Book Quotes - Page 790

I sold 'Time Life' books on the telephone. It's probably the only pure skill job I've ever had. When you're on and you're good, you get 'yes' after 'yes'. When you're slightly off, you get rejection after rejection. It was one of the greatest jobs I ever had. It was brutal.

Before I start a project, I always ask myself the following question. Why is this book worth a year of my life? There needs to be something about the theme, the technique, or the research that makes the time spent on it worthwhile.

Your obligation as writers is to distinguish yourself. … The ultimate result should be a book that you write that no one else could have written.

I love books, I love art, I'm a fanatic nature and wildlife person. People assume I'm a political animal, power hungry, wanting to run for office. And anyone who knows me knows that none of that's true.

Mother used to say escape is never further than the nearest book. Well, Mumsy, no, not really. Your beloved large-print sagas of rags, riches, and heartbreak were no camouflage against the miseries trained on you by the tennis ball launcher of life, were they? But, yes, Mum, there again, you have a point. Books don’t offer real escape, but they can stop a mind scratching itself raw.

I often lose myself in the Sudoku-like challenges of making a book work.

I have always preferred maps to books. They don't answer you back.

When I think about it, I'm happily bewildered that people will preorder my books They'll preorder me. What a lucky guy!

I elbowed my way into the grubby café, bought a pie that tasted of shoe polish and a pot of tea with cork crumbs floating in it, and eavesdropped on a pair of Shetland pony breeders. Despondency makes one hanker after lives one never led. Why have you given your life to books, TC? Dull, dull, dull! The memoirs are bad enough, but all that ruddy fiction! Hero goes on a journey, stranger comes to town, somebody wants something, they get it or they don't, will is pitted against will. "Admire me, for I am a metaphor.

But you have read Madame Bovary?' (I'd never heard of her books.) 'No.

Nothing ever invented can you a bigger life than a book.

There are innumerable writing problems in an extended work. One book took a little more than six years. You, the writer, change in six years. The life around you changes. Your family changes. They grow up. They move away. The world is changing. You're also learning more about the subject. By the time you're writing the last chapters of the book, you know much more than you did when you started at the beginning.

I feel that what I do is a calling. I would pay to do what I do if I had to. I will never live long enough to do the work I want to do: the books I would like to write, the ideas I would like to explore.

Once I discovered the endless fascination of doing the research and of doing the writing, I knew I had found what I wanted to do in my life. Every book is a new journey. I never felt I was an expert on a subject as I embarked on a project.

One of the things about the arts that is so important is that in the arts you discover the only way to learn how to do it is by doing it. You can't write by reading a book about it. The only way to learn how to write a book is to sit down and try to write a book

To hold the reader's attention, you have to bring the person who's reading the book inside the experience of the time: What was it like to have been alive then? What were these people like as human beings?

Books fall open, you fall in.

Can Protagonist think of a single film that interests him as much as the three-hundredth best book he ever read?

I look for two things when I am about to launch into a book. First, there has to be a dramatic arc to the story itself that will carry me, and the reader, from beginning to end. Second, the story has to weave through larger themes that can illuminate the world of the subject.

I went back to the notion of story, which is always a good thing to have if you're trying to get people to pay attention to a book and pick up information along the way.

Making books is hard work. Some books are, of course, more demanding than others.

She never said, "No, don't buy that trash," or "Pick a real book." She knew they were all real books. This is how great a librarian she was. And how great a mom.

Books are growing more honest at a younger age, and the world is becoming less warm and fuzzy. Or at least the monsters are out in the open.

I do, in fact, have a book club. I meet with a couple of guys once a month of a lunchtime discussion of some interesting text, usually, but not always, philosophical.

I didnt want to write a book that suggested that magic good/technology bad.