Book Quotes

At first, I spend about four hours a day writing. Toward the end of a book, I spend up to 16 hours a day on it, because all I want to do is make it good and get it done.

If you don't like my book, write your own. If you don't think you can write a novel, that ought to tell you something. If you think you can, do. No excuses. If you still don't like my novels, find a book you do like.

Moby Dick - that book is so amazing. I just realized that it starts with two characters meeting in bed; that's how my book begins, too, but I hadn't noticed the parallel before, two characters forced to share a bed, reluctantly.

I like to match what I wear to my book jacket - it's a little bit cheesy, but it's my thing.

If you never ask yourself any questions about the meaning of a passage, you cannot expect the book to give you any insight you do not already possess.

It's very difficult to read a book on your computer.

When I'm writing a book, you can't think about your audience. You're going to be in big trouble if you think about it. You're got to write from deep inside.

There are writers who say they have no social responsibility except to write a good book, but that doesn't satisfy me.

In my first book, Under Fire, I wrote that I revered Ronald Reagan. That was a dozen years ago. I still feel that way. I think he changed the world for the better for my children and my children's children.

I just noticed recently that in one book after another I seem to find an excuse to find some character who, to put it idiotically simply, is allowed to talk crazy.

'Gone With The Wind' is one of the all-time greats. Read Margaret Mitchell's book and watch the film again; it's a soap opera in all its glory. It is superb and memorable.

It may sound a bit like an army barracks, but the truth of the matter is: there must be some time laid aside for arranging, time for working on either a book or an article - I've written two articles in the last four months for the New York Times book review section.

Getting out of the hospital is a lot like resigning from a book club. You're not out of it until the computer says you're out of it.

Most films are rooted in a book or a comic strip, but I don't go out there saying I want to do adaptations.

More generally, I made an effort to leave out things that weren't relevant to the main narrative themes of the book, namely that there were two sides to Steve Jobs: the romantic, poetic, countercultural rebel on one side, and the serious businessperson on the other.

Writing this book was very therapeutic because it helped me face my relationship with my dad.

If you get a book which is 600 pages, you have to reduce it to a script of 100 pages. In two hours of film, you cannot possibly include all the characters.

No man understands a deep book until he has seen and lived at least part of its contents.

You don't want to dwell on your enemies, you know. I basically feel so superior to my critics for the simple reason that they haven't done what I do. Most book reviewers haven't written 11 novels. Many of them haven't written one.

People have given me classified information, but always with the disclaimer 'This can never end up in a book.' And it never does.

For me, it's writing a book and telling people about this story.

First you wonder if they're separate stories, but no, they're not, they're contingent stories and they form a pattern. And you begin with some of the island as the place to which the heroine of the book returns.

Everyone thinks they're going to write one book of poems or one novel.

The anti-apartheid prisoners on the island, like so many in every age and nation, found that Shakespeare had a peculiar ability to gentle their condition. They used to gather clandestinely to read the plays; on one occasion, the book was passed around for each man to mark his favourite lines.

Usually I am not a conspiracy theorist. I don't believe in the Bilderbergers as a conspiracy or the Trilateralists. But I am certain that the Communists killed JFK. There is a super great book called 'Legend' by Edward Jay Epstein that makes it all perfectly clear.

Well just meeting J. K. Rowling was amazing because she created all this world. And all the fans, we all get so obsessed with it and then you met the one person who made it all up. It was just so amazing. And I was just so amazed that that she wrote this book and all of the films have happened.

There's no point in making a film out of a great book. The book's already great. What's the point?

Thirteen years I took on this last book.

Even though I may not intend it when I set out to write the book, these places just emerge as major players in what I'm doing, almost as if they are insisting on it.

I know, speaking for myself, no matter what I'm able to do, no matter what book comes out and ends up on paper, I always had something bigger and grander in my head.