Books Quotes

There are some friends you don't meet for twenty years and when you meet them again it's as if no twenty years has happened - you're lucky when that happens. I feel the same about books.

What a word is truth. Slippery, tricky, unreliable. I tried in these books to tell the truth.

Most of the books that I've written have been focused on, sort of, the individual, and sort of, either a voice, a personal voice, or a kind of transforming event where they step forward to fight for something they value.

People in my books tend to get their just deserts, even if not at the hands of the police.

Two more years were to go by before I knew anything about William Blake. Many years later, when his wife died, my godfather gave me the two books as a remembrance.

Books are humanity in print.

As an adolescent I wrote comic books, because I read lots of them, and fantasy novels set in Malaysia and Central Africa.

I was a total education geek. I loved school. I loved learning. I loved doing homework. All of my books and notebooks from high school are underlined and highlighted and there are notes all over the margins. And you know, I was a theater kid too. I was all over the place.

Always in my books, I like to throw that rogue element into a stable situation and then see what happens.

Comic books and The Chronicles of Narnia. My mother used to read those to me and my twin brother growing up.

Movies can't ruin books. They can only ruin movies.

The fate of the singers who, like my songs, went up in flame was also the fate of the books which I later wrote. All of them went up in flame to Heaven in a fire which broke out one night at my home in Bad Homburg as I lay ill in a hospital.

I love everything that's old, - old friends, old times, old manners, old books, old wine.

In my subconscious, my books were part of a single emotional journey.

Generally my typical books have lots of twists and turns a big surprise ending and then usually another surprise at the end and ideally, as in Garden of Beasts, we get to the very end and we find at the last few pages that there's yet another surprise.

If God had meant Harvard professors to appear in People magazine, She wouldn't have invented The New York Review of Books.

As a kid I was fascinated with sports, and I loved sports more than anything else. The first books I read were about sports, like books about Baseball Joe, as one baseball hero was called.

I like my men to be manly, as you'll see from my books.

I've had aunts and uncles who not only haven't read my books but could hardly believe that I was a writer.

I love the idea that we put in jokes the kids don't get. And that later, when they grow up and read a few books and go to college and watch the show again, they can get it on a completely different level.

Got an hour or two? That's all it takes for one of my books.

In my books, women often solve the problem. Even if the woman is not the hero, she's a strong character. She does change the plot. She'll often rescue the male character from some situation.

I'd experienced the '40s and '50s by looking at my grandparents' old clothes, books, and magazines.

Other people, including me, have written books with main characters who were old and rich. Or old and brilliant. Old sages, old wizards, old rich people.

My parents both had Oxford degrees, they read important books, spoke foreign languages, drank real coffee and went to museums for pleasure. People like that don't have fat kids: they were cut out to be winners and winners don't have children who are overweight.

Professional reviewers read so many bad books in the course of duty that they get an unhealthy craving for arresting phrases.

I'm not going to tell a person how to think, don't believe in that. What I want to do, when I write these books, is just to say don't be so sure of yourself. Let me pull the carpet out from underneath you, and let's see if you can still find the footing.

I've always had great respect for Paddington because he is amusingly English and eccentric. He is a great British institution and my generation grew up with the books and then Michael Horden's animations.

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 had to find my way of translating the excitement you get when you're reading comic books to the big screen.