Book Quotes

I'm no good at describing my books. 'Holes' has been out now for seven years, and I still can't come up with a good answer when asked what that book is about.

books have been my greatest comfort, castle-building a never-failing delight, and scribbling a very profitable amusement.

Don't write the book you think publishers want to commission. Plenty of other writers will be doing the same thing.

I am at the bookstore a lot, but let my friends, the professional Birchbark Books staff, handle the day in and day out.

You really need to approach each book as if you have been a failure. . . . If you start to believe your flap-copy, you're finished as a writer.

I always have some way of putting the stories together that works for the book. I've always switched points of view in my books. I'm a Gemini.

Dvoretsky's Endgame Manual ... may well be the chess book of the year... [It] comes close to an ultimate one-volume manual on the endgame.

I realize that books are not the entire world, even if they sometimes seem to contain it. But I need the stupid things.

Here is the alphabet of the pulsing apocalypse that is fatherhood, a book in love with what words, like parents, create: beauty, terror, awe.

Blessings be the inventor of the alphabet, pen and printing press! Life would be -- to me in all events -- a terrible thing without books.

I teethed on books of heroes such as Winston Churchill, Abraham Lincoln and King David.

You know not every book has to have a happy ending, but it has to have a satisfying ending.

When I work on a book, I usually start with a question. And I don't sit around and go "I need to write a book. What's a good question?" It will be a question that's just clanging around in my head.

You can't know what a book is about until the very end. This is true of a book we're reading or writing.

I'm one of those writers who, when writing, believes she's god-and that she hasn't bestowed free will on any of her characters. In that sense there are no surprises in any of my books.

I write sets of books, but I've also written a lot of orphans.

there won't be any pain, he promised. Only an eternity together. Come back to me. (Stanton, book #5)

A long time ago, I had an idea to make a book for preschoolers who had older siblings who were going to school.

I remember when I was working on All Alone in the Universe, and Robin Roy was my editor. When I first sent it to her, she said kids this age don't want pictures in their books.

By the time I finished the book [All Alone in the Universe], Robin Roy was saying, "More pictures!"

With most of my books, there are some parts that pop up right away, and other parts I have to wait for.

I started thinking about [ what book is going to go next] when I was working on As Easy as Falling Off the Face of the Earth.

I made a drawing for a book I'm working . It's a little drawing of a girl who's ashamed and upset and hides in the corner of the closet. It's the kind of drawing that I feel like I'm really good at.

One of my favorite moments in that book [As Easy as Falling Off the Face of the Earth] was when something happened that I had no idea was going to happen.

I still do believe that form and content are very much related. I think throwing away some of the rule books on that is a good thing.

To some people, the fact that I am not married, or don't have children, would be the reason I have written a book on punctuation.

For anyone addicted to reading commonplace books . . . finding a good new one is much like enduring a familiar recurrence of malaria, with fever, fits of shaking, strange dreams . . . .

Hard work makes easy reading or, at least, easier reading.

It is in the book of man, not the book of god, that we must look for examples of heroism, love, pity, justice, truth, honor, humanity.

I get annoyed with movies or books, songs or records that deliberately try to make you feel a certain way.

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.

More than 3,500 hardcover novels are published each year. Even the most avid reader buys fewer than one a week.

Maybe it's the readers that make a book global.

It's a sort of patronizing idea that literature for children has to feature role models of exemplary behavior. I think not only is that bogus, but it leads to really boring books.

I had Elvis' number in my book and I never called it.

I wasn't a normal professor. I had worked in government. I hadn't written nine zillion books. I was a hands-on professor.

If I have something I want to say that is too difficult for adults to swallow, then I will write it in a book for children.

Stories have a richness that goes way beyond fact. My writing knows more than I know. What a writer must do is listen to her book. It might take you where you don't expect to go.

With each book I write, I become more and more convinced that the books have a life of their own, quite apart from me.

if a book is not good enough for a grownup, it is not good enough for a child.

I picture my books as movies when I get stuck, and when I'm working on a new idea, the first thing I do is hit theaters to work out pacing and mood.

I think that whenever a book is not a challenge, I'm telling the wrong story.

Write the book you've always wanted to read, but can't find on the shelf.

I couldn't imagine anyone ever reading a book enough to make it look like that. It looked like it had been driven over by a school bus after someone had taken a bath with it.

Then I picked my book back up again and stroked her hair and read to the soundtrack of her breaths.

I don't cry at books or movies. Ever. So imagine my shock and awe when I read 'The Time Traveler's Wife' for the second time, and I knew the ending, and I started to cry.

Misty of Chincoteague', 'The Black Stallion', the 'Saddle Club' books, I read 'em all. I was horse-crazy.

Oh, filmmakers, please don't take my soft book and turn it into a horror, or take my horror and make it soft.

I've always loved reading fantasy. I used to pick out all the books in the library that had the little unicorn sticker on the side to show that they were fantasy.

The propagation of truth and nonviolence can be done less by books than by actually living on those principles.