Book Quotes

I wanted to go to Portland because it's a really good book town.

Quite often I can be in a bookshop, standing beneath a great big picture of myself and paying for a book with a credit card clearly marked John Grisham, yet no one recognises me. I often say I'm a famous author in a country where no one reads.

When you reread a classic, you do not see more in the book than you did before; you see more in you than there was before.

If a book I've committed myself to review turns out to be 'disappointing' I make an effort to present it objectively to the reader, including a good number of excerpts from the text, so that the reader might form his or her own opinion independent of my own.

I've always believed in writing without a collaborator, because where two people are writing the same book, each believes he gets all the worry and only half the royalties.

Well yes so far, I was recently in Germany and they had me do six book signings a day and that was too much so I had them cut it down to about three. It becomes taxing at times but its a lot of fun and you meet a lot of nice people.

I've made mistakes, I've misspoke, I am sure I will again sometime, but that happens, that's part of being human in my book. I'm OK with that. I've never done it maliciously, ever.

The things I want to know are in books; my best friend is the man who'll get me a book I ain't read.

Reading a book is like re-writing it for yourself. You bring to a novel, anything you read, all your experience of the world. You bring your history and you read it in your own terms.

I think that the economics of book publishing favor hits with long book runs. You make all your money on the last bunch of books, not the first.

Some authors have a very hard time understanding that in order to be faithful to the spirit of the book, it's almost always impossible to remain faithful to the text. You have to make changes.

Also, I had read a book called She's Not There: A Life in Two Genders, written by a professor who had gone through transgender surgery, but it took this person well into his thirties to come to terms with the absolute necessity of having to do it.

Miss a meal if you have to, but don't miss a book.

Definition of a classic: a book everyone is assumed to have read and often thinks they have.

Somebody will be able to crack ebook files in the same way that people cracked music files a decade ago. An author could have worked for three years on his book, have someone buy it for their Kindle for £6.99 and then see it shared with everyone in the world for free.

What are people going to do? Fire me? I've been fired before. Not book me? I've been out of work before. I don't care.

Reading is a conversation. All books talk. But a good book listens as well.

It is true what Rimbaud said; If you think a book is strong enough, try it at the ocean, in the wind, at the waves. If the book can resist the ocean, then it exists. Otherwise, throw it away.

Books constitute capital. A library book lasts as long as a house, for hundreds of years. It is not, then, an article of mere consumption but fairly of capital, and often in the case of professional men, setting out in life, it is their only capital.

I used my aviation contacts to open a travel agency. I used to book Caribbean flights.

I'm constantly revising. Once the book is written and typed, I go through the entire draft again.

In one sense I feel that my book is a one-woman argument against determinism.

Hands down, the biggest thrill is to get a letter from a kid saying, I loved your book. Will you write me another one?

The novels take longer to write than the picture book texts, and they do take a different sort of concentration. However, a very short, simple story that works well is just as exciting to me as any longer and more complex book.

At this very moment I'm behind on a compilation that Slave Labor is doing for Free Comic Book Day.

Philately is normally a boys' hobby but for some reason it was in vogue at my junior school. Between the ages of eight and ten I collected avidly. I'd pore over my Stanley Gibbons book, obsessively checking my collection's value. I always hoped I'd stumble across a really valuable one, a Penny Black or an Inverted Jenny, but it wasn't to be.

People aren't quite sure what it means when a book is a Booker Prize winner. They're not quite sure what is being recommended, what literary values it stands for, because every year it stands for something different.

It was actually a very nice little book done by a gift book company. They illustrated it with pictures from 1920s football, before there were face guards.

A good heavy book holds you down. It's an anchor that keeps you from getting up and having another gin and tonic.

How long most people would look at the best book before they would give the price of a large turbot for it?