John Quotes

I really think that reading is just as important as writing when you're trying to be a writer because it's the only apprenticeship we have, it's the only way of learning how to write a story.

We're professional worriers. You're constantly imagining things that could go wrong and then writing about them.

'Do you know,' he asked in a delicious accent, 'what Dom Pérignon said after inventing champagne?' 'No?' I said. 'He called out to his fellow monks, 'Come quickly: I am tasting the stars!'

All the things paper-thin and paper-frail, and all the people too.

It turns out that, somehow, there are a tremendous number of things to be optimistic about.

My thoughts are starts I can't fathom into constellations.

I didn't even know what the feeling was, really, just that there was a lot of it.

It is not my fault that my parents own the world's largest collection of black Santas.

Nothing has ever looked like that ever in all of human history.

Don't swear in the Literal Heart of Jesus.

Why are breakfast foods breakfast foods?

Our children are weird. Nicely phrased.

You could drive past it without noticing and from what I understand, you ought to.

I leaned in toward her, suddenly overwhelmed with the feeling that we must kiss.

So I let her go, too. And I'm sorry.

Love is just a shout in the void.

If I ever end up being the kind of person who has one kid and seven bedrooms. Do me a favor and shoot me.

Is the labyrinth living or dying?

Did I help you to a fate you didn't want?

She fell apart because that's what happens.

We were just looking at ideas of each other.

Maybe some people need to believe in a proper and omnipotent God to pray, but I don't.

There's a place in the brain for knowing what cannot be remembered.

Reading forces you to be quiet in a world that no longer makes place for that.

My responsibility is to try to tell true stories. To me a true story is always hopeful, but never simply, uncomplicatedly happy.

We do an epically bad job of acknowledging one another's work and checking our sources.

Books are like tweets, except longer.

Stupid truth, always resisting simplicity

The joy you bring us is so much greater than the sadness we feel about your illness.

We have this habit of romanticizing the lives of writers. I remember when I was a kid, I was like, 'I want to be Kurt Vonnegut.'

Read a lot. Read broadly... Tell stories to your friends, and pay attention to when they get bored... Write a lot.

Different authors write different ways, have different relationships with their audiences, and those are all legitimate.

I like to build places online where readers can have productive conversations about books.

I wrote my first novel and my second novel in Chicago. It was the place where I became a writer. It's my favorite city.

I've read a lot of bad books. I used to review books for a living, and when you're a reviewer you read tons of terrible books.

Will Grayson, Will Grayson' is about two guys named Will Grayson who live in different Chicago suburbs who eventually meet each other.

I love making YouTube videos. I love Tumblr, I love Twitter. I love talking with people I find interesting about stuff I find interesting, and the Internet is a great way to do that.

I think it's crazy, crazy that book tours lose so much money. They shouldn't. Book tours should be part of what keeps independent bookstores vibrant and profitable.

I know what happens a the end of falling-landing.

That's how writing works, at least for me: even the stuff that doesn't work out gets funneled into the stuff that does work out.

Go spit in the face of our inevitable obsolescence and finish your @#$&ng novel.

The Catholic hierarchy has become more conservative. What we don't know is whether [Catholic voters] will become increasingly conservative, or .. stay swing voters.

The right story needs the right telling.

Right, except I'm not going to lie to my mom, because what kind of (man) lies to his own mother?

Nerdighters make me believe in America again.

I'm at the eye doctor. I'm always at the eye doctor. It's like this is my profession. I am no longer a writer, I'm now an optomoligical patient. By the way, this job doesn't pay well.

Nerdfighter pwns woot. Everyone knows that.

I don't have a favourite book, I have hundreds.

I have two kinds of Facebook friends: Those who know what 'DFTBA' means, and those who don't.

You can't not like "The Great Gatsby." It's got the best sentences in, like, ever.