John McCarthy Quotes
Asking a critic to name his favorite book is like asking a butcher to name his favorite pig.
Quotes to Explore
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Hands down, the biggest thrill is to get a letter from a kid saying, I loved your book. Will you write me another one?
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A real book is not one that we read, but one that reads us.
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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 read a lot of comic books and any kind of thing I could find. One day, a teacher found me. She grabbed my comic book and tore it up. I was really upset, but then she brought in a pile of books from her own library. That was the best thing that ever happened to me.
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I never want to write a book just to tell a story. There is always something deeper going on.
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I enjoy it too much - even if I knew I'd never get a book published, I would still write. I enjoy the experience of getting thoughts and ideas and plots and characters organised into this narrative framework.
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I know from an editor's point of view or a publisher's point of view it's easier to slot me into a particular niche. But I know that I'd be bored unless I wrote a book that in some senses was a challenge.
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Everyone's clamoring for the fourth book in the 'Fifty Shades' trilogy, which makes me laugh. Just the part of 'a fourth book in trilogy' that makes me laugh, not the clamoring for the next book.
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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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Let us remember: One book, one pen, one child, and one teacher can change the world.
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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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A tactic used by authors of virtually every single book I've ever read that propounds a conspiracy theory is to attack an agency as being part of a conspiracy in the Kennedy assassination, but when this same agency comes up with something favorable to the author's position, the author will cite that same agency as credible support for his argument.
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I don't really know what the Great American Novel is. I like the idea that there could be one now, and I wouldn't object if someone thought it was mine, but I don't claim to have written that - I just wrote my book.
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I have considered rap music stars, and there is one in my new book, Lovers and Players, and there is also a hip-hop music mogul who I think you will like a lot.
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A comprehensive marketing plan involves both online and offline efforts to use and broaden your existing platform to promote your book.
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Oh I'm a huge comic book movie fan.
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I love teaching online at my website and soon I'll be writing a math book. I love to teach math. I just don't have time for a full-time teaching gig. Acting is way too time-consuming.
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I have only ever read one book in my life, and that is White Fang. It's so frightfully good I've never bothered to read another.
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The thing I'm always trying to do when I write is hit that sweet spot where the book both keeps you up late at night, and yet a week after you've finished, it still pops back into your head.
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One of the few luxuries left is travel. And the aspect of travel that is luxurious is not the movement, but the being there.
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We look backward too much and we look forward too much; thus we miss the only eternity of which we can be absolutely sure - the eternal present, for it is always now.
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There are almost no limits to the discoveries of how the human brain operates in illness and health, in sleep and waking and dreaming, in calm and under tension. The question is how far man can put these discoveries to use without using them not for cure but for power.
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Asking a critic to name his favorite book is like asking a butcher to name his favorite pig.
