Book Quotes
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At night, I read. I read for two hours. I just finished a marvelous book by Louise Erdrich, 'The Round House.' But mostly I read 20th-century history and biography. I lived then. I was either a child or at school or at work.
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I don't read 'chick lit,' fantasy or science fiction but I'll give any book a chance if it's lying there and I've got half an hour to kill.
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A recurrent theme of this book is that luck plays a large role in every story of success; it is almost always easy to identify a small change in the story that would have turned a remarkable achievement into a mediocre outcome.
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The story of 'A Dog's Purpose' flowed into me a set piece. The entire book was just there, as if I were connected to a streaming service, a novel wholly formed of character and plot. This has never happened to me before or since. I prayed for help and I got it. A gift.
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I don't think any good book is based on factual experience. Bad books are about things the writer already knew before he wrote them.
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I had an insanely long commute - New York to D.C. - when I worked at 'National Geographic.' I hate to waste time, so I spent my time by writing about my life on the premise that I might be able to pitch those as short essays to magazines. It wasn't until later that I realized that I was writing a book.
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I don't have a process; I just feel it. My book on acting would be very short.
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We see book-burning as a crime against humanity: it's intolerable because books represent a kind of freedom to us.
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Writers tell stories better, because they've had more practice, but everyone has a book in them. Yes, that old cliche.
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Many people think that it is important to have a title before you begin writing the book, but I think you should never sit around waiting for the right title to strike before you start writing. Crack on with the story, put in the hard work, and the title will come eventually.
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The moment I said I'd finished a book, I knew what would happen. There would be a bidding war, and I would end up with someone who'd got the fattest wallet, who had bought it because I'd written Harry Potter. That would have been why.
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With 'Free Agent Nation,' I was figuring out how to write a book along with writing the book. Now I think I've kind of, sort of figured out how to write a book a little bit better. But the process remains not that different - slow; laborious; tiny, incremental progress each day, punctuated by feelings of despair and self-loathing.
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Once I found this possibility to use Twitter and Facebook and my blog to connect to my readers, I'm going to use it, to connect to them and to share thoughts that I cannot use in the book.
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Genuine polemics approach a book as lovingly as a cannibal spices a baby.
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With each book, in each place, I have to keep an ongoing map as I write because otherwise I don't know where I am.
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Whenever I have a few hours to dive into a book, I am happy.
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The very quick and high sales of the book caught us off guard, but fortunately we got the second edition from the printers at the end of last week and the shops should now be stocked again.
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Take a newspaper account of Waterloo or Trafalgar, with all the small advertisements: it seems much more real than reading about it in a history book.
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And she never could remember; and ever since that day what Lucy means by a good story is a story which reminds her of the forgotten story in the Magician's Book.
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When I began work on my first book, 'The River of Doubt,' which tells the story of Theodore Roosevelt's 1914 descent of an unmapped river in the Amazon rainforest, I thought of it as a tale of adventure, exploration and extraordinary courage.
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Only another writer, someone who had worked his heart out on a good book which sold three thousand copies, could appreciate the thrill that overcame me one April morning in 1973 when Dean Rivers of our small college in Georgia appeared at my classroom door.
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When you write non-fiction, you sit down at your desk with a pile of notebooks, newspaper clippings, and books and you research and put a book together the way you would a jigsaw puzzle.
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With almost every book I've written, my secret target audience is the young therapist. In this way, I am staying in my professorial role; I'm writing teaching stories and teaching novels.
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Whatever extra there is in me at any given moment isn't fully formed. I am hardly aware of it; it awaits the next book. It will - with luck - come to me during the actual writing, and it will take me by surprise.
