Book Quotes - Page 764

And then he tells her stories. Myths he learned from his instructor. Fantasies he created himself, inspired by bits and pieces of others read in archaic books with crackling spines.

I don't always write in order, so composing multi-book stories could get complicated.

The boy spends most of his time reading. And writing, of course. He copies out sections of books, writes out words and symbols he does not understand at first but that become intimately familiar beneath his ink-stained fingers, formed again and again in increasingly steady lines.

I can read in any book and newspaper about the city of Detroit, but I want to hear what the people in Detroit have to say about Detroit. My best education is actually talking to people.

It's one of those things where the book has all these stars that burn really bright that you hang onto and they're all saying, 'This is The Girl on the Train experience.' All those stars or hooks needed to be in the film, but sometimes they needed to be a bit different. It's important when adapting such a popular book to hit all those points but also break out expectations without slaughtering the book. And that was, for me, the joy of adapting the book.

The gaslight of the film [The Girl On The Train] became something that really needed to be dramatized more than the book did, because it wasn't going to read as strongly on screen.

I wanted to keep the complexity of the female experience in the film as much as it is in the book, and the subject of not wanting a child is a very interesting subject, one that's not dealt with very much actually.However that complexity was not serving the story of what became the film [The Girl on the Train].

I always thought that the location of this film [Girl In The Train] was on the train and inside her imagination, and her loneliness and her gaze out the window.Although it was set in England, it didn't feel to me like an overly English book. In terms of the use of cultural references, it was not extreme, so it was very simple to go from England to America in the adaptation.

If you think reading a book is hard, you should try writing one. Because it's even harder. It's still not as hard as writing a game, though. If you discount the purely visual pop-up parts, a book is made almost entirely of words. As a novelist, you just need to think of a few decent strings of words and then fill the other 98% of the book with more or less random descriptions of things and exclamation points.

I have come to believe that large print, thick and heavy paper, and wide margins and oversize leading is indicative of the expected intelligence of the reader. … Compare children's books and books on Web Duhsign or other X-in-21-days books. If the reading level of a specification is below college level, chances are the people behind it are morons and the result morose.

Would you buy a book proudly stating on the cover that its reader is a dummy? Or would you think "of course it's ironic"?

Digression is my passion. I love telling the main stories, but in some ways, what I love most is using those narratives as a way of stringing together the interesting stories that people have kind of forgotten, and that are kind of surprising. The problem is, how do you pare stories away so that the book doesn't become a distracting jumble of material, and readers lose focus? In my experience, there's really only one way to do that. I pack it all in with the rough draft, then count on myself and my trusted readers to tell me what's good and what's not good.

Reading is such a personal thing to me. I'd much rather give someone a gift certificate to a bookstore, and let that person choose his or her own books.

To me, writing is a very physical process. I lay out the entire book with the two narratives side by side on my bedroom floor, and just get down on my hands and knees and start looking at it in that physical space. "Does this really follow from this? Should this be here or elsewhere?" I will literally cut the paper into paragraphs. I'll cut it into segments and move the segments around from one narrative to the other until I feel that I've found the natural structure.

We can't really make a living doing comic books, despite the fact that would be an awfully fun way to make a living.

I don't necessarily read everything. I read what I need to read to inspire the book I'm trying to finish.

Books go out into the world, travel mysteriously from hand to hand, and somehow find their way to the people who need them at the times when they need them ... Cosmic forces guide such passings-along.

I believe I belong to the last literary generation, the last generation, that is, for whom books are a religion.

Women's books are kind of discriminated against. If a man writes a book about his family stories, people think of it as literature. If it's a woman, she's 'spilling her guts,' and it's not art.

The aim of my writing is to utterly remove the distance between author and reader so that the book becomes a sort of semipermeable membrane through which feelings, ideas, nutrients pass.

A dreary censorship, and self-censorship, has been imposed on books by the centralization of the book industry.

I write slowly by hand. Publishing is effectively bankrupt for you unless you are Danielle Steele. It takes a year to write book and advances are going down or disappearing.

You could never be certain what you would find in a book that had spent time with someone else.

What I've done for the last ten years is develop high profile entertainment properties for animation, so it's kind of funny to be able to create my own book to already know how I'd want to develop it for animation and live action.

Tokyopop's been extraordinary. They approached me to do My Dead Girlfriend - Julie Taylor, one of the senior editors was a huge fan of The O.C. - asked if I'd be interested in creating a book for Tokyopop. My Dead Girlfriend was the book we all agreed upon as being the one that I would do first, and they've just embraced it completely.