My first job is to write a book that I believe is compelling and deserves the long sustained attention that any novel requires, and to worry about the commerce only late in the game. Joshua Ferris
My philosophy is that I'm an artist. I perform an art not with a paint brush or a camera. I perform with bodily movement. Instead of exhibiting my art in a museum or a book or on canvas, I exhibit my art in front of the multitudes. Steve Prefontaine
My rule has always been, write the next part of the book that you seem to know well. So I won't necessarily write chapter two after chapter one. Justin Cronin
My writing has to support more than my research habit, but I love to curl up with a book about some dusty corner of history. Lynn Abbey
No book includes the entire world. It's limited. And so it doesn't seem like an aesthetic compromise to have to do that. There's so much other material to write about. Paul Auster
O Day of days when we can read! The reader and the book, either without the other is naught. Ralph Waldo Emerson
Often the grind of book promotion wearies you of your own book - though at the same time this frees you from its clutches. Julian Barnes
Once you publish a book, it is out of your control. You cannot dictate how people read it. Margaret Atwood
One of the people that wrote a forward to my book is Gerry Spence, whom I admire. Gerry is a friend of mine, and Gerry's perhaps the leading criminal defense attorney in the country. Vincent Bugliosi
One of the things I have tried to do with this book and with all of them really is avoid that simple, easy, reductionist view of motivation and to show we do things for a complex net of reasons, a real braid of reasons. Russell banks
One of the traps or the pitfalls of writing a trilogy - or a triptych, or whatever term you want to use - is that the second book can be a long second act to get you from book one to book three, which borrows all of its energy from the first book. Justin Cronin
One rainy Sunday when I was in the third grade, I picked up a book to look at the pictures and discovered that even though I did not want to, I was reading. I have been a reader ever since. Beverly Cleary
One thing that worried me was how writers get categorized and so they end up having to write the same kind of book again and again. That is fine if it is what you want to do, but I would rather be locked in the trunk of my car with a weasel than write the same book every three years until I die. Justin Cronin
Our coach was absolutely out of his head. He must have read Bear Bryant's book. We had 78 players out. The first day 35 quit. Twenty quit the second day. We ended with 17 players. It was depressing. Merlin Olsen
People are lonely. They want company and your book can provide them company and a little bit of hope. And there's nothing wrong with that. Donald Miller
People ask me if I ever thought of writing a children's book. I say, 'If I had a serious brain injury I might well write a children's book', but otherwise the idea of being conscious of who you're directing the story to is anathema to me, because, in my view, fiction is freedom and any restraints on that are intolerable. Martin Amis
Perfect heroines, like perfect heroes, aren't relatable, and if you can't put yourself in the protagonist's shoes, not only will they not inspire you, but the book will be pretty boring. Cassandra Clare