Dale Peck Quotes
Don't come to New York until you've finished a book. It's too expensive. You'll never write anything. You'll spend all your time working to pay the rent.
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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One half who graduate from college never read another book.
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On the streets, hanging out with the fellows, there are things you learn that no book can teach you.
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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 can ask for a £25,000 advance, but then you spend a year writing the book, and £25,000 is a loan against sales, and you can easily spend five years earning out. So that's £25,000 for six years.
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I am an author, and like many in my profession, I am also a traveling salesman, going all over in an attempt to persuade people to spend twenty-five dollars on a hardcover book by me.
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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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We did a play of 'Frog and Toad' at my elementary school. And I'm not sure if this is part of the book or it was something that we made up on our own, but I auditioned to play the black hole, which somehow makes sense to me.
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In a typical history book, black Americans are mentioned in the context of slavery or civil rights. There's so much more to the story.
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You have to write the book that wants to be written. And if the book will be too difficult for grown-ups, then you write it for children.
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So many people are working in vaudeville today that I looked for three weeks to book enough acts for an hour bill and didn't have them until the night before we opened in Buffalo and money was no object!
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Philosophy is written in this grand book, the universe, which stands continually open to our gaze. But the book cannot be understood unless one first learns to comprehend the language and read the letters in which it is composed.
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I'm not a fan of self-help books - how can something be 'self-help' if the book itself is purportedly helping you?
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Housekeeping is incredibly difficult with three kids. I'm trying to be more relaxed. You'll go insane if you try to have a picture-book house.
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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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When I'm writing a book, sentence by sentence, I'm not thinking theoretically. I'm just trying to work out the story from inside the characters I've got.
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The Internet's impact is immense. My students can't imagine ever paying for a book.
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There was a manifesto in the late '60s/early '70s, and it basically laid out what 'black art' was and that it should embrace black history and black culture. There were all these rules - I was shocked, when I found it in a book, that it even existed, that it would demarcate these artists.
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If you actually dissect the lyrics in 'Motley Crue', you'll notice that there's a lot going on beneath the surface.
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I find I've always been judgmental about comedy (laughs) and it's hard to turn that off, really. But what constant exposure to live comedy does is it makes you give people a second chance.
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People who act like angels ought to have angels to deal with.
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A proper family diary with everyone's events and parties in it really helps organise the household.
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Don't come to New York until you've finished a book. It's too expensive. You'll never write anything. You'll spend all your time working to pay the rent.
