Oh, I just want what we all want: a comfortable couch, a nice beverage, a weekend of no distractions and a book that will stop time, lift me out of my quotidian existence and alter my thinking forever.
Despite having written five books, I worry that I have not written the right kinds of books, or that perhaps I have dedicated too much of my life to writing, and have therefore neglected other aspects of my being.
There’s no trouble in this world so serious that it can’t be cured with a hot bath, a glass of whiskey, and the Book of Common Prayer.
You know, it’s hard work to write a book. I can’t tell you how many times I really get going on an idea, then my quill breaks. Or I spill ink all over my writing tunic.
If we lose our phones, we lose our phone books. You don’t memorize numbers anymore.
There are all sorts of books offering advice on how to deal with life-threatening situations, but where’s the advice on dealing with embarrassing ones?
It sounds so geeky, but I really do like studying and reading, and if I’m not working on ‘Harry Potter,’ then my greatest relaxation is to sit with a book.
Books are the training weights of the mind.
As a reader, I want a book to kidnap me into its world. Its world must make my so-called real world seem flimsy. Its world must lure me to return. When I close the book, I should feel bereft.
I stand in the mist and cry, thinking of myself standing in the mist and crying, and wondering if I will ever be able to use this experience in a book.
A book burrows into your life in a very profound way because the experience of reading is not passive.
I believe I belong to the last literary generation, the last generation, that is, for whom books are a religion.
A dreary censorship, and self-censorship, has been imposed on books by the centralization of the book industry.
I don’t necessarily read everything. I read what I need to read to inspire the book I’m trying to finish.
All authors know that any book is a casting of runes, a reading of cards, a map of the palm and heart. We make up the ocean – then fall in. But we also write the life raft.
Home is where your books are.
A book is a box brimming with incendiary material. The reader strikes the match.
Women’s books are kind of discriminated against. If a man writes a book about his family stories, people think of it as literature. If it’s a woman, she’s ‘spilling her guts,’ and it’s not art.
I write slowly by hand. Publishing is effectively bankrupt for you unless you are Danielle Steele. It takes a year to write book and advances are going down or disappearing.
The only difference between men and women is that women are able to create new little human beings in their bodies while simultaneously writing books, driving tractors, working in offices, planting crops – in general, doing everything men do.