Book Quotes
I believe that I improve with every book I write - most writers will probably tell you the same thing. I'm still learning my craft and will be until the day I drop dead at my computer. In my opinion, art isn't something that can be perfected. There's always room for improvement.
David B. Coe
It is my solemn duty to stay up all night researching and writing the history of these three hapless youngsters, but you may be more comfortable getting a good night's sleep. In that case, you should probably choose some other book.
Daniel Handler
I don't get far enough into a boring book to hate it.
Garry Wills
Today I begin to understand what love must be, if it exists... When we are parted, we each feel the lack of the other half of ourselves. We are incomplete like a book in two volumes of which the first has been lost. That is what I imagine love to be: incompleteness in absence.
Edmond de Goncourt
When I wrote the eight fairy tales that appear in 'Horse, Flower, Bird' I was working toward a completely new form of artistic expression, trying to create a new kind of tale that also felt vintage: innocent and childlike, but haunted. I tried to write a picture-less picture book.
Kate Bernheimer
I'm aware that many of my friends will be saddened and shocked, or shock-saddened, over some of the chapters in 'The Catcher in the Rye.' Some of my best friends are children. In fact, all my best friends are children. It's almost unbearable for me to realize that my book will be kept on a shelf, out of their reach.
J. D. Salinger
The dirtiest book of all is the expurgated book.
Walt Whitman
I get mad when people call me an action movie star. Indiana Jones is an adventure film, a comic book, a fantasy.
Harrison Ford
I needed to really pursue music and learn what I needed to learn on my own by getting in and doing it, not by reading a book about it.
Kacey Musgraves
A lot of people say writers start losing their powers after 60 or 65. But I look at the best-seller list and see a book by that 14-year-old gymnast, Dominique Moceanu, and I think, 'Now, what's she going to tell the world? And these 25-year-old rock stars, what are they going to tell the world?'
Frank McCourt
You have plausible deniability, as they say in politics, as an author with movies. Because if the movie is terrible, you simply say they failed to catch the genius of the book.
Walter Kirn
You're not a historian, but most historians will tell you that they make very discrete judgment as to what facts to omit in order to make their book into some shape, some length that can be managed.
Oliver Stone
Another thing that's quite different in writing a book as a practicing newspaperman is that if you look at what you've written the next morning and you think you didn't get it quite right, you can fix it.
Adam Clymer
My husband wrote the story for my first book, but then he didn't want to do that anymore. So if I was going to go on being an illustrator, I had to start writing the stories, too.
Natalie Babbitt
Writers are not just people who sit down and write. They hazard themselves. Every time you compose a book your composition of yourself is at stake.
E. L. Doctorow
A book comes and says, 'Write me.' My job is to try to serve it to the best of my ability, which is never good enough, but all I can do is listen to it, do what it tells me and collaborate.
Madeleine L'Engle
You have to capitalise on any success you have and keep doing what you do as well as you can. But how do you define success? In my book, it's to be playing those parts you saw your idols - Judi Dench, Maggie Smith, Helen Mirren, Vanessa Redgrave - playing when they were the age you are now.
Janet McTeer
During my second draft pass on my last book I made 20,000 words happen in a week, which is practically supernatural for me, and it would never have been possible without three nights in a hotel in my own city.
Laini Taylor