Book Quotes - Page 645

I've had many more thousands of books in my possession than my shelves at home would indicate. At one time, I tried to keep them all, but that quest soon became impossible; I now only keep the ones I'm sure I'm going to reread, the ones I'm definitely going to read before I die, and the ones I can't bear to part with because of an aesthetic or emotional attachment.

I am fatally attracted to all bookstores.

This book is dedicated to all of my friends who helped me get to where I am today - you know who you are... and when I find you I am going to kill you.

When you're done [with writing a book], people tell you "Well, gee, I'm not interested." "Great, I'm glad I sat down and wrote this!"

We had to figure out how to produce books in a cost-effective way.

For me, a good children's book is a good children's book is a good children's book.

My ultimate goal is to drive people back to the books, when I think of an adaptation.

When I was 35 I realized that I was still thinking a lot about what it would be like to go to Narnia. To really go - not just in a daydream, or in a children's book, but what it would actually feel like, physically, psychologically, every other way. The idea was haunting me.

Wasn't there a spell for making yourself happy? Somebody must have invented one. How could he have missed it? Why didn't they teach it? Was it in the library, a flying book fluttering just out of reach, beating its wings against some high window?

I'm not one of your knockabout, knuckle-scarred, Internet-controversy-courting book critics. Occasionally I stumble into controversy accidentally, but not because I enjoy it. It's probably just because I'm a weird person.

Oddly, the meanings of books are defined for me much more by their beginnings and middles than they are by their endings.

My book group has one rule: no books for adults. We read young adult fiction only.

It's a terrible thing for a book, when you feel like you're supposed to like it.

Book tours are excellent things, and one is lucky to get to go on one, but they have a way of leeching away one's will to live.

I've only read three books by Stephen King. When I was 10 I read 'The Long Walk,' one of his pseudonymous Bachman books. In my early 20s, while trapped on a family vacation, I read 'The Dark Half,' which taught me a word I have never forgotten: psychopomp. Now I have read '11/22/63.'

People - me included - want to get excited about books. Good books are a good thing.

A novel with a bad middle is a bad book. A bad ending is something I've just gotten in the habit of forgiving.

I guess I was raised in a household with a lot of reverence for the physical sanctity of books. You didn't destroy books.

I mean, when you're tired of book reviews, you're tired of life.

How often have I met and disliked writers whose books I love; and conversely, hated the books and then wound up liking the writer? Too often.

Being a writer can be isolating. It's good to be among readers and booksellers.

Becoming an author changes your attitude too. Once you see where books come from, and how they're made, they never seem quite as sacred again.

I read a lot of literary theory when I was in graduate school, especially about novels, and the best book I ever read about endings was Peter Brooks' 'Reading for the Plot. '

When the oldest Chatwin, melancholy Martin, opens the cabinet of the grandfather clock that stands in a dark, narrow back hallway in his aunt’s house and slip through into Fillory...it’s like he’s opening the covers of a book, but a book that did what books always promised to do and never ac tually quite did: get you out, really out, of where you were and into something better.

I don't know if I've ever derived such an immediate sense of calm and well-being from any book as I did from 'Right Ho, Jeeves.' It was like I was Pac-Man and the book was a power-up.