Book Quotes
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It's really a misconception to identify the writer with the main character, given that the author creates all the characters in the book. In certain ways, I'm every character.
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With each book I write, I become more and more convinced that the books have a life of their own, quite apart from me.
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Ten years ago, you wrote a book and you never expected to find out anything about the author. Now with social media, everyone wants that connection. I think our readers want to be invited into our lives and brought on the journey and be part of this whole process.
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I've written some standalone novels, but a book series allows fans in. There's much more intense involvement.
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You can find dozens of books about people taking the Trans-Siberian Railroad. I knew I had to do something different to cross Siberia. To drive and to talk with people along the way, that was how I wrote my book 'Great Plains'. I drove and camped in Siberia, but did not have a real program.
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Every book is like starting over again. I've written books every way possible - from using tight outlines to writing from the seat of my pants. Both ways work.
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I've grown up with girls that are like Precious. I've grown up with people that are like everyone that I read about in that book. And so years later, when I was given the role, I just felt a huge responsibility to show the reality of that situation and to show that we're not making it up.
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They liked the book the better the more it made them cry.
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Pedro Teixeira, the great Portuguese merchant-adventurer, wrote a beautiful description of a coffeehouse with windows overlooking the Tigris and the ruins of old Baghdad. That was in 1604, and he's visiting the same street that I write about in the book, named after Abu Nuwas, though it wasn't called that back then.
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As children, we all hold on to the myth of omnipotence. Comics are successful because kids identify with superheroes. They'll read a book or watch a TV programme and say, 'I'm that guy.' And that guy is always the one in control.
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If David Bowie wants, I'll put him in my phone book.
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The price of an e-book is a lot less than the price that we're charging for a hardcover book. It's about the same as we charge for a paperback. And that means a different revenue stream.
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A lot of poets too live on the margins of social acceptance, they certainly aren't in it for the money. William Blake - only his first book was legitimately published.
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I'm going to write a book, continue acting, continue motivational speaking and just share with people who I am and what I've learned in my second chance of life and pass it on to people in their first chance of life.
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With few exceptions, the publishing industry has come to a consensus: if a book has a young protagonist, and if its worldview is primarily interested in the questions that crop up when coming of age, then it's a young adult novel.
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My mom was dying for me to write a book, she was my biggest advocate.
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I always loved books. I don't remember learning to read, it was just something I always did. I was hungry for knowledge, I guess, and information; I was a curious kid. I still am.
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In motorsports we work in the grey areas a lot. You're trying to find where the holes are in the rule book.
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In America there's a tendency to write the same book over and over because that's what sells. So in a way, my success in America has come at the expense of what I do. I haven't sold out, and I haven't taken the popular road to writing a best-selling book. I've really bucked the system. So it was necessary for me not to go and find the easy fans, the ones who want something digestible and fast with a happy ending that they can read over and over again no matter how many different books it is. I had to find fans who really wanted to think. Worldwide they all have that in common.
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Simon Critchley's 'The Book of Dead Philosophers' - it's a quick thumbnail sketches of philosophers through the ages.
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I don't think people really understood what I did. And you know, in my book, 'A Helluva High Note' deals with my back story, that I was a songwriter, that I spent years trying to hone my craft and being rejected and then finally becoming a successful songwriter, record executive and publisher.
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I'm always interested to see what films are made of books. I kind of don't participate as a filmgoer in any kind of debate about what's better, the book or the movie. So I think it's interesting when people want to do it.
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McSweeney's as a publishing company is built on a business model that only works when we sell physical books. So we try to put a lot of effort into the design and production of the book-as-object.
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Having the book-club army embrace you is a gift that keeps giving for years.
