Book Quotes
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The book that is the closest genetically to 'Goon Squad' is 'Look at Me.' It has the futuristic element - although, freakishly, almost every aspect I invented has come to pass in some way, including the terrorist who fantasies about blowing up the World Trade Centre. That was extremely uncomfortable. The book came out on the week of 9/11.
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I'm always imposing my taste in books on others. I hope that people enjoy being surprised by a book they might not otherwise read - I enjoy the surprise myself when others do this to me.
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Every time I write a new book, I want to push myself to try something different.
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I was very priggish as a child. I saved up for a book on medieval English nunneries, for which I was despised by my friends.
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'Oh, but I've done some other unforgivable, unspeakable thing'? Google it. There's seven billion of us. Somebody has done exactly what you have done, and is currently on a book tour. You're never alone!
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I want this book to be facts, to be important, to be history.
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It's a very 18th-century thing to have a book broken into several volumes.
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When I was young I longed to write a great novel that should win me fame. Now that I am getting old my first book is written to amuse children.
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Five minutes in an old book quickly reveals that most of what is being sold today as new insights into human behavior is merely the rediscovery of knowledge we have had for centuries.
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Religion, it stops people from thinking because they think all the answers are in that one book; it impedes progress; it justifies crazy people. Flying planes into a building was a faith-based initiative.
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As for environmentalism, I'm only an environmentalist by accident. I live in New York, so I bike, and the closest grocery store to me sells organic produce. I also shop with a book bag because I ride a bike, and it's hard to carry the paper or plastic bags.
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Luck usually visits me at 2 am on a cold morning when, red-eyed and bone-weary, I am pouring over law books preparing a case. It never visits me when I am at the cinema, on a golf course or reclining in an easy chair.
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All writers learn this, in time: don't show your work to other people until it's safely finished. Even discussing your unborn book in quite general terms can be such an undermining experience that, afterwards, you give it up and go to live in Guatemala.
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Looking back, I do think one of the reasons 'Thirteen Reasons Why' has been so successful is not because it deals with serious issues but because I had a unique and interesting way to tell that story. I knew the issues were going to be dealt with in the book, but I felt my job was to write the story as entertainingly as possible.
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You are free to love without an agenda
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When I created Quirke, he was 6ft 6in and blond. But then a woman reader wrote to me and said, 'Why do you keep saying his hair is blond? It's not. It's brown.' I wrote back to her and told her that, of course, she was right. So I darkened his hair and now that he's being played by Gabriel Byrne; with each successive book he gets a bit smaller and smaller.
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You should study the Peerage, Gerald. It is the one book a young man about town should know thoroughly, and it is the best thing in fiction the English have ever done.
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But what I hope for from a book - either one that I write or one that I read - is transparency. I want the story to shine through. I don't want to think of the writer.
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In the case of 'The Book Thief,' my research was hearing the stories of my parents when I was a child. But I started changing the stories when I began moulding the book.
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I would take to be quite a fool any man who would make a book full of laws and statutes for an apple tree telling it how to bear apples and not thorns, when the tree is able by its own nature to do this better than the man with all his books can describe and demand.
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My book is very wild. But you know during the period of BATMAN, that there were thousands of Batman and Robin costumes sold and these weren't just for kids.
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There is no Frigate like a book to take us lands away nor any coursers like a page of prancing Poetry.
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A powerful agent is the right word. Whenever we come upon one of those intensely right words in a book or a newspaper the resulting effect is physical as well as spiritual, and electrically prompt.
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I never think of an entire book at once. I always just start with a very small idea. In 'Holes,' I just began with the setting; a juvenile correctional facility located in the Texas desert. Then I slowly make up the story, and rewrite it several times, and each time I rewrite it, I get new ideas, and change the old ideas around.
