Quotes About Books

Even though it doesn't look like it, I run. On a treadmill. And I bounce around to all the songs on my iPod - the Pixies, Wagner, Richard and Linda Thompson, even books on tape. Just not self-help ones.

Reading is a lot like eating for me: If I try to read a book I'm not hungry for, I won't enjoy it, but if I wait until I have a real appetite for something, I'll devour it.

I have a couple of dozen books on my reader: ideal for a long trip or an afternoon waiting at the medical clinic. It's flexible.

I grew up with four T.V. channels. If you missed a show, you missed it. You gotta wait a week for the next one. I'd mail-order books: take a quarter, get an envelope, send off for it and wait until it arrived. I grew up waiting for things.

I confess that I am a messy, disorganized and impatient reader: if the book doesn't grab me in the first 40 pages, I abandon it. I have piles of half-read books waiting for me to get acute hepatitis or some other serious condition that would force me to rest so that I could read more.

Sergey Brin has said to me, like, 10 times now, 'Why do you bother doing books? Why don't you just put all this stuff on the Internet?' It's because 10 years from now, my book will still be sitting on someone's coffee table or in a waiting room.

There was a time when going out to parties and dinner parties and clubs was an exciting thing to do. I'd wake up in the morning and immediately think, 'Now what am I doing tonight?' Now I'd be more likely to reach for a book.

It pretty much defeats the purpose of bedtime reading if you fall asleep before the kids do. And you tend to wake up with a matchbox stuck on the end of your nose and/or a potty on your head.

I definitely subscribe to the idea that 9/11, to use an overused phrase, was a wake-up call. There was a year-long national teach-in on Islam - everyone read books and suddenly talked about Islam, and that was very productive. But there's no doubt that moment has passed.

I'm not itching to sue Amazon or Wal-Mart... they sell a lot of books. But the future is very uncertain with books.

For me to be a billion-dollar author, I need to have people buying my books at Wal-Mart.

I grew up in the seaside town of Porthcawl in South Wales, the third eldest of four children. We weren't overly bookworm-ish but I found the library magical - and I thought librarians earned their wages from book fines!

In real life, people are integrated into society. That's what happens in my books as well. Minor characters don't just walk in and spout lines, they interact and have an effect on the events. It's not an isolated universe.

I am not a gym person, so I do walk a lot. I find gym is incredibly boring. Other thing I do is to devour books because I feel we need to feed our mind as well.

I was a library rat and a bookworm. I read all the time. I walked to school reading books. I read under my desk.

I talked late, swam late, did not learn to ride a bike until college - and might never have walked or learned to drive a car if my parents hadn't overruled my lack of motivation and virtually forced me to embrace both forms of transportation. I suspect I was happy to sit in a corner with a book.

If you walked into my house, there wouldn't be one thing to do with football in there.

Because I'm a walker, natural history is my subject; I've always been obsessed with landscape, and I have an elegiac tone in most of my books.

There were two free public libraries within walking distance of my home; I remember taking six books home from every visit, the limit set by the library.

I loved Bernard Cornwell's books.

The best way to get me to write more books is to read the ones that exist!

I was so inspired by Beverly Cleary's funny and wonderful books.

My books are personal: I'm not saying they're the Bible of music.

The only book in our home was the Bible. My parents forbade books. They thought I needed help because I wanted to be a writer!