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"There are good books and there are bad books, period, that's the distinction."
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"Thanks to bad graphic design, some readers love only the electronic version of some books."
Author Name
Personal Development
"Books that you carry to the fire, and hold readily in your hand, are most useful after all."
Author Name
Personal Development
"The multitude of books is making us ignorant."
Author Name
Personal Development
"The oldest books are only just out to those who have not read them."
Author Name
Personal Development
"I've got a long list of books I wish I'd never written-and I've kept them all out of print for the past 20 years."
Author Name
Personal Development
"I had forgotten what fiction was to me as a boy, forgotten what it was like in the library: fiction was an escape from the intolerable, a doorway into impossibly hospitable worlds where things had rules and could be understood; stories had been a way of learning about life without experiencing it, or perhaps of experiencing it as an eighteenth-century poisoner dealt with poisons, taking them in tiny doses, such that the poisoner could cope with ingesting things that would kill someone who was not inured to them. Sometimes fiction is a way of coping with the poison of the world in a way that lets us survive it."
Author Name
Personal Development
"If you want to publish two books a year under your own name and your publisher doesn't, maybe you need a different publisher."
Author Name
Personal Development
"I know many books which have bored their readers, but I know of none which has done real evil."
Author Name
Personal Development
"Isn't it true that a well-read book seems more alive to you, Ms Rainn?"
Author Name
Personal Development
"What if I were seeking a hardcopy? A book I can bury my nose in metaphorically and literally if I'm a self-confessed book-sniffer and proud to say so."
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Personal Development
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"I write best in the morning, and I can only write for about half a day, that's about it."
Day
"There are good books and there are bad books, period, that's the distinction."
Books
"The only other thing which I think is important is: Don't write a book or start a book with the expectation of communicating a message in a very important way."
Expectation
"It was really written as most, I think, books are by writers - for themselves. There was something that just had to be written, in a way that it had to be written. If you know what I mean."
Books
"And when I'm writing, I write a lot anyway. I might write pages and pages of conversation between characters that don't necessarily end up in the book, or in the story I'm working on, because they're simply my way of getting to know the characters."
Conversation
"When you're very young and you learn something - a fact, a piece of information, whatever - it doesn't connect to anything."
Fact
"People always ask about my influences, and they cite a bunch of people I've never heard of."
People
"One of the problems you have when you read with kids is that once they like something they want you to read it a hundred times."
Kids
"I received a grant from The Ford Foundation to write a book for kids about urban perception, or how people experience cities, but I kept putting off writing it. Instead I started to write what became The Phantom Tollbooth."
Experience
"But I find the best things I do, I do when I'm trying to avoid doing something else I'm supposed to be doing. You know, you're working on something. You get bugged, or you lose your enthusiasm or something. So you turn to something else with an absolute vengeance."
Enthusiasm
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