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Books Quotes


"I've always loved words. I ate up all the books I could get my hands on, and when I couldn't get books, I read candy wrappers and labels on cereal and toothpaste boxes."


"The biggest markets for my books outside the UK are France and Italy, and those are the two countries where I also have the closest personal relationships with my translators - I don't know whether that's a coincidence, or if there's something to be learned from it."


"When you are writing, of course, you have to do all that writing and correcting for yourself. When I was a librarian it was expected that I would know about a wide range of books."


"Master books, but do not let them master you. Read to live, not live to read."


"Books are not made for furniture, but there is nothing else that so beautifully furnishes a house."


"We are as liable to be corrupted by books, as by companions."


"The core " and perhaps unexpected " thing that books do for us is simplify. It sounds odd, because we think of literature as sophisticated. But there are powerful ways in which books organise, and clarify our concerns " and in this sense simplify."


"To limit the press is to insult a nation; to prohibit reading of certain books is to declare the inhabitants to be either fools or slaves."


"I will only start taking book reviews seriously from the day that books are able to review readers."


"Children simply don't make the distinction; a book is either good or bad. And some of the books they think are good are very, very bad indeed."


"The new spirituality will bring about what I'm calling the 'end of better.' And that is in fact what is called for in the next of the series of books that I've been writing."


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


"The more books we read, the clearer it becomes that the true function of a writer is to produce a masterpiece and that no other task is of any consequence."


"I always wanted to go to the Chavez school but I could never afford it when I was growing up so a lot of my learning came from magic books and watching other magicians. I was also very lucky that I had a couple of really good magic teachers."


"There's not too much difference between writing a picture book and writing a collection of a hundred poems or so, except that the bigger books take a lot longer to do."


"The writer I feel the most affinity with - you said you felt my books are 19th century novels, I think they're 18th century novels - is Fielding, Henry Fielding, he's the guy who does it for me."


"I'm not sure Kinsey has changed in these first twelve books. I think the reader learns more about her, but from Kinsey's perspective, only three years have passed while the rest of us have been getting older at a much faster clip."


"Some books are undeservedly forgotten; none are undeservedly remembered."


"The books that everybody admires are those that nobody reads."


"I don't believe in personal immortality; the only way I expect to have some version of such a thing is through my books."


"I hate books; they only teach us to talk about what we don't know."


"I knew that if I wrote a new book every six months or every year, if I continued to read great books, eventually I would write something worthy of publication. I understood I might be in my forties or my fifties or even my sixties, but I felt confident that it would happen."


"I admire the world of the books and the characters that she's created, but I'm not an addict of Harry Potter. I don't feel possessive about it."


"Books can now be on the stands within days from delivery of a formatted manuscript, and often are."
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