Book Quotes
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My main piece of advice would be don't worry about being published - just write a really good book, but also don't be afraid to write a bad book. Give yourself permission to fail, and don't be afraid.
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I wasn't one of those kids who grew up wanting to write or who read a particular book and thought: 'I want to do that!' I always told stories and wrote them down, but I never thought writing was a career path, even though, clearly, someone was writing the books and newspapers and magazines.
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I told my whole life story in my book.
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Don't use your advance to buy an antique sports car, diamonds by the yard, or a bottle of wine from Thomas Jefferson's cellar instead of investing in your book.
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In the biographical novel, there's only one person involved. I, the author, spend two to five years becoming the main character. I do that so by the time you get to the bottom of Page 2 or 3, you forget your name, where you live, your profession and the year it is. You become the main character of the book. You live the book.
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The parent reads the book. The kid reads the book and then they can talk about the characters instead of talking about themselves. You know there's a connection even if you don't talk about it when you read the same books.
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Ruth Montgomery had a book I was reading called Aliens Among Us. She was an automatic writer. She used to go into a trance, and she would just start typing information, and then she would come out of her trance and read it and go, "Wow," and that was just the way she wrote her books.
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You really ought to read more books - you know, those things that look like blocks but come apart on one side.
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That's the only interaction I have with people, those talking shows. Most of the people in my phone book are artists, management, producers, engineers. I don't ever call people with, "Hi! How are you?" I say, "How are you? Do you have that 16/30 ready? When do you want me to come into the studio?" That's what I do.
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It doesn't require much thought for one to realise that any travel book worthy of the name has to be a departure from the standard idea of the form.
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I've often wished when I started a book I knew what was going to happen. I talked to writers who write 80-page outlines, and I'm just in awe of that.
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Yeah, I think A Confederacy of Dunces is probably the perfect New Orleans book.
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The novel is about, for me, sustained and organized looking. I do think that people have a hunger for a sustained engagement, that concentration that the book can offer.
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The best book, like the best speech, will do it all - make us laugh, think, cry and cheer - preferably in that order.
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I think the fact that I use salty words in my Bonhoeffer book would tip you off that I'm no prude, exactly.
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I think I settled on the title before I ever wrote the book.
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What led to my change of views about the Clintons was working through the research and writing on the book on Hillary.
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I worked on 'Lonesome Dove' three weeks all together. When I heard they were doing it, I wanted to be involved since I'd read the book.
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Technology is supposed to make our lives easier, allowing us to do things more quickly and efficiently. But too often it seems to make things harder, leaving us with fifty-button remote controls, digital cameras with hundreds of mysterious features and book-length manuals, and cars with dashboard systems worthy of the space shuttle.
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Deliberately or not, every author is of course present in every book he or she writes - even in a scientific text.
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Books are standing counselors and preachers, always at hand, and always disinterested; having this advantage over oral instructors, that they are ready to repeat their lesson as often as we please.
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People say that this new generation is so used to the Internet that their heads are already different. They can't read a book from beginning to end. That is not a tragedy. The book changes form.
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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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My feminism is what came squarely up against my faith. There's a lot of ecstatic post-patriarchal Christians who have stuff they do with that. But at that point, you're doing Christianity with a double-superscript. The Bible, and especially the book of Genesis, is pretty unapologetically patriarchal.
