Jack Gantos Quotes
Quotes to Explore
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I developed a mania for Fitzgerald - by the time I'd graduated from high school I'd read everything he'd written. I started with 'The Great Gatsby' and moved on to 'Tender Is the Night,' which just swept me away. Then I read 'This Side of Paradise,' his novel about Princeton - I literally slept with that book under my pillow for two years.
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I've planned book tours for myself, whether or not anybody wants to hear what I have to say. I've weighed in on things like what the cover looks like, what the copy looks like, how it's going to be promoted - just every aspect of it.
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I haven't found it to be particularly enjoyable... ninety percent of the time when I go on dates, I'm thinking, 'I could be reading my book instead.'
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One half who graduate from college never read another book.
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In my downtime, you'll mostly find me curled up with a book. I love reading biographies. My favourites are those of Dalai Lama, Osama Bin Laden, and Einstein.
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I'm not expecting the American literary community to welcome me with open arms. To them I'm just some schmuck kid who wrote some book.
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I must be like the princess who felt the pea through seven mattresses; each book is a pea.
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I don't really read 'business books,' and I didn't think 'The Paradox of Choice' was a business book. I'm very surprised and gratified that the business world thought it was one.
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After 20 years, a million written words, and nine rejected novels, I finally landed a book contract.
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My house is filled with books, most of which I have read, some of which I intend to eventually get to. I'm always reading at least one work of fiction and one work of non-fiction simultaneously. Whatever mood I'm in, there's always a book nearby to suit it.
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I like to believe, as a writer, that anybody who isn't a reader yet has just not found the right book.
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I wasn't one of those kids who grew up wanting to write or who read a particular book and thought: 'I want to do that!' I always told stories and wrote them down, but I never thought writing was a career path, even though, clearly, someone was writing the books and newspapers and magazines.
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I have become infected, now that I see how beautifully a book is coming out of all this.
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It's easier to release an ebook than a print book.
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'Holes' was my favorite book ever. So you know when you love a book and you hear it's being made into a movie and it makes you a little annoyed at first? But I would've loved to play the Shia LaBeouf role in that movie when I was younger. I just wanted to be the rebellious kid on the old digging camp.
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'Perfect' is about a set-up that looks perfect from the outside - beautiful country house, beautiful wife and mother, everything where it should be - and the deep fissures that, in fact, lie beneath that. 'Perfect' was partly a response to the shock of my first book, 'The Unlikely Pilgrimage Of Harold Fry,' being a success.
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I love writing two narratives! I think concurrent storylines are my favorite way to write a book.
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What I look for in any book is an argument, based on evidence, that changes the way I think about something important.
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No matter how vital experience might be while you lived it, no sooner was it ended and dead than it became as lifeless as the piles of dry dust in a school history book.
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Somebody's real voice is probably the hardest one that somebody could attempt.
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I never did believe in the equality of the sexes, but no girl is the weaker vessel if she gets first grip of the kitchen poker.
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I didn't take theater or anything. We didn't have a very good theater program. It was in western Utah - was a really small school. It wasn't developed. We didn't have the funds to do anything like that, but I did act all through high school in films because Disney Channel would shoot movies out there.
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We have such a great depth of human history in all of the arts, whether it's opera or mathematics or painting or classical music or jazz. There's so many things to study, new books to read, and certainly always ways to transform old ideas and to come up with new ones.
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Because each book has its own special perfume.
