Book Quotes
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If there is any kind of legitimate ostalgia, it's for everything we've never even seen, the women we've never slept with, never dreamed of, the friends we haven't made, the books we've never read, all the food steaming in the pots we've never eaten out of. That's the only real kind of nostalgia there is.
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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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I always wanted to write a book about a common food that becomes a commercial commodity and therefore becomes economically important and therefore becomes politically important and culturally important. That whole process is very interesting to me. And salt seemed to me the best example of that, partly because it's universal.
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I'm trying to find out what's actually true, which is nearly always something, if not a world of things, that you can't read in books.
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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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When I was about 15, I picked up the guitar and learned how to play by going through Beatles chords books. I got this Christmas gift with the entire Beatles catalog.
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The main benefit of the book for the more experienced practitioners is as an evangelical tool. The book will give you some ways of expressing the value and importance of your work that you may not have had before.
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Thirteen years I took on this last book.
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An avid reader, I never missed a book by Judy Blume or Agatha Christie. They both remain two of my favorite authors. If I could have combined these ladies into one person, that's who I would have wanted to be when I grew up.
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Be kind and considerate with your criticism... It's just as hard to write a bad book as it is to write a good book.
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People sometimes ask who I would cast in my books and I never have any idea. I don't think I could ever write a book thinking of it as a movie the whole time. This would be like building a house and filling it with furniture just so you could have blueprints.
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'Flaubert's Parrot' is an amphibious book in which what appears to be a personal essay about Flaubertian writing is gradually, delicately transformed into an extremely sad novel in which the differences between character, author, and narrator are less clear than they appear at first glance.
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I think the suicides in my first book came from the idea of growing up in Detroit. If you grow up in a city like that you feel everything is perishing, evanescent and going away very quickly.
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There is nothing in our book, the Koran, that teaches us to suffer peacefully. Our religion teaches us to be intelligent.
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I never experiment with anything in my books. Experimentation means you don't know what you're doing.
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I try to create a challenge for myself in each book. And sometimes, believe me, I just kick myself afterwards, and say, 'Why on earth did you ever attempt this, you idiot!' But I'm always better for the experience.
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No time is ever wasted if you have a book along as a companion.
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I really appreciate what it takes to create a book. I understand the loneliness that it involves and the excitement and the vulnerability: I especially identify with that.
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I actually wasn't much of a book reader at all before the 'Twilight' series. They just draw you in, and people love them. They're terrific books.
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After working as a journalist I went to a writing program at Johns Hopkins. It was interesting because it was neither journalistic nor historical, but it emphasized writing style, and afterwards I was asked to write my first book.
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If no one knows your book is out there, no one will think about buying it. It's as simple as that.
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I try to make the readers feel they've lived the events of the book. Just as you grieve if a friend is killed, you should grieve if a fictional character is killed. You should care. If somebody dies and you just go get more popcorn, it's a superficial experience isn't it?
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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 can understand the natural anxiety of readers when waiting for another installment of a favourite series, but I think it is much more important to get a book right than it is to have it appear on time.
