Book Quotes - Page 745

And I have finally realized that, you know, it's not a given that my lifespan will accommodate my writing aspirations. It could be that it would take me 12 more books at six years each to get it - which means I would have to live to be 126. Which I fully intend to do, of course.

One of the revelations in that book [Lincoln in the Bardo] for me was this idea about citizenship. Even that word - citizenship - for someone my age, it makes me cringe. But, to me, the political space we're in now argues for a reboot of fairly simple ideas and the examination of the way that Americans have not been living into them.

While writing this book [Lincoln in the Bardo], [idea of inclusion] occurred to me, you either believe in the Constitution or you don't. If you do, it's intense in what it wants of us.

There were several points where I would kind of turn to the book and say, "Get thee behind me." I don't think real novelists do that. But I make a distinction between prose that's very efficiency-minded (like, the minimum I can get away with), versus loosening the screws and letting the words spill out beautifully and so on.

As the writer of this book [Lincoln in the Bardo], what I loved was the feeling of having so many surprises come at the end that I hadn't really planned or planted.

[In the moment of reading writer and reader] are both briefly their best selves, or at least better selves. A flawed human being writes something and 60 years later a reader picks up the book and something in them rises to meet it.

The publication of a book only brings very paltry results to its author.

The Book of History is the Bible of Irony.

Most people were startled to find out there were books that preceded Game Of Thrones. I'm a case of working forty years to be an overnight success.

There are a number of things that I'm trying to get into the books. There's a meta-fictional aspect, if I may use that pretentious word, to writing anything. You're writing in the shadow of all the people that have gone before and, in a way, you're having a dialogue with them. As someone who's read J.R. Tolkien and Robert E. Howard and all the great fantasists before, this is almost my answer to them.

There are a lot of people out there who will write books, in which everything turns out nicely and the bad guys lose, the good guys win, the boy gets the girl and they live happily ever after. There's a million books like that and if that's the comfort you're looking for, you should read those books and not my books because that's not the kind of book that I am interested in.

I had written three books [Games of Throne], at that point, and each one of them was better than the other. At a certain point, as the books were doing well, I started getting interest from Hollywood, from various producers and studios who were initially interested in doing a feature film. I met with some of those people and I had phone conversations with some of those people, but I didn't see it being done as a feature film.

You always try to do your own thing. One of the things I wanted to do was to write a book that combines some of the best traits of contemporary fantasy with some of the traits of the historical novel.

With a book I am the writer and I am also the director and I'm all of the actors and I'm the special effects guy and the lighting technician: I'm all of that. So if it's good or bad, it's all up to me.

The vast majority of writers out there, they finish their books and no one cares whether their book is late or ever comes out at all. And then it comes out and two reviews are published and it sells 12 copies.

Names are hard. I have a library of What to Name Your Baby books, and I’m always picking up new books, and books of baby names from other countries. I like cool-sounding names.

One of the things I love, and I'm a voracious reader as well as a writer, is books that surprise me, that are not predictable.

I have idea files of books that I want to write one of these days, stories I want to write one of these days, but I'll probably never get to them.

It’s being ready to accept rejection. You can work on a book for two years and get it published, and it’s like you may as well have thrown it down a well. It’s not all champagne and doing interviews with The New York Times.

That little touch is not in the books, but I wish it had been in the books because it was a great addition.

I've written some standalone novels, but a book series allows fans in. There's much more intense involvement.

As a writer, my goal, (which I'm never going to achieve, and I know that, and no writer can achieve that,) but my goal is to make you almost live the books. I want you to fall through that page and feel as if these things are happening to you.

It's really irritating when you open a book, and 10 pages into it you know that the hero you met on page one or two is gonna come through unscathed, because he's the hero. This is completely unreal, and I don't like it.

[as for evolution]....cutting out the sections [on the subject] is preferrable if the portions are not thick enough to cause damage to the spine of the book as it is opened and closed in normal use. When the sections needing correction are too thick, paste the pages together being careful not to smear portions of the book not intended for correction.

The most important thing for any aspiring writer, is to read! And not just the sort of thing you're trying to write, be that fantasy, SF, comic books, whatever. You need to read everything.