Book Quotes
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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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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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I now can be sure that, once I start writing a book, I'll be able to finish it. I've also become more assured about my 'voice' as a writer and being able to keep the characters true to themselves.
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I've got a publicist at Houghton Mifflin Harcourt who's been working little miracles for me, but it's true the budgets aren't what they once were in terms of advertisement and book tours.
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One of the things I love about writing is the way you can use what you know and what you've experienced, without actually writing about yourself. I've given many of my experiences and perceptions to many of the characters in the book, but none of them is me.
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Fundamentalism - of any variety - is a form of illiteracy, in that it asserts that it is necessary to read only one book.
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The Bible was the only book he read. He didn't read it often but when he did he wore his mother's glasses. They tired his eyes so that after a short time he was always obliged to stop.
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But suppose, asks the student of the professor, we follow all your structural rules for writing, what about that something else that brings the book alive? What is the formula for that? The formula for that is not included in the curriculum.
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When I was little, my older brother, Gary, was forced to read a book a week in fourth grade. The books he liked he threw on my bed when he was finished with them. This continued throughout my childhood and made me a reader for life.
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Here's how adaptation works - almost everything in the movie is in the book in some form. But it's as though the deck has been completely reshuffled and some of the cards have been assigned different values, some of the fours have been made into jacks, and some of the jacks have been made into twos.
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My mom is a self-taught home cook, so books that offer guidelines on how to organize menus are critical to 'cook from the book' people like her.
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I don't want to go slumming in somebody else's pain just to write a book. I want to go into those darker places to shine a light on that experience and come out with a story that validates the human spirit.
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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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I collect books, and I love libraries. I love bookstores. And to me meeting a writer is important. And when I saw a book with my name on it I almost passed out.
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Any character that can't be kept straight, to me, isn't a character who should be in the book – you know, anyone not vivid enough to have a claim on my attention.
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I think every professor and writer is in some way an exhibitionist because his or her normal activity is a theatrical one. When you give a lesson the situation is the same as writing a book. You have to capture the attention, the complicity of your audience.
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No book that is written for an external purpose is going to be a passionately felt book for the writer or the reader. I don't see the point in doing that.
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From the Desert I come to thee On a stallion shod with fire; And the winds are left behind In the speed of my desire. Under thy window I stand, And the midnight hears my cry: I love thee, I love but thee, With a love that shall not die Till the sun grows cold, And the stars are old, And the leaves of the Judgment Book unfold!
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I love any book that makes my family seem almost normal.
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I'm not going to break up my family, not for a book.
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Sometimes, readers, when they're young, are given, say, a book like 'Moby Dick' to read. And it is an interesting, complicated book, but it's not something that somebody who has never read a book before should be given as an example of why you'll really love to read, necessarily.
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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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I have to write what I can write, and writing the text of a picture book is like walking a tightrope, if you ramble off... As my friend Julius Lester says, 'A picture book is the essence of an experience.'
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When I read a book, I like to be surprised. I don't want to read the same genre formula that I've read a hundred times before.
