Quotes About Books

All my books take a long time to research. I spend several months researching before I start writing, and in the middle of writing I often have to stop and look up stuff. At my local library, I am one of the best customers! The research takes several months.

If I'm researching something strange and rococo, I'll go to the London Library or the British Library and look it up in books.

It is true that it is usually for their books that novelists reserve their most considered and ordered thoughts, but the fact is they arise inescapably from one consciousness: the same one that is occupied in all the other activities which make up a life.

I have always been an oddball. I was a loner at school, and largely still am, preferring to shut myself away with my work and books than go to parties.

I am a quiet person's nightmare. The only time I shut up is when I'm reading, because I'm a book geek.

I shy away from showing cruelty on the page. A lot of the violence in my books actually happens off stage. The police come on to the scene after the event has occurred.

There are books on our shelves we haven't read and doubtless never will, that each of us has probably put to one side in the belief that we will read them later on, perhaps even in another life.

I look at books as being a form of activism. Sometimes they'll show us a side of the world that we might not have known about.

I do feel that the boys are getting left out. Girls will read boys' books, but boys won't read girls' books. If you're writing for a girl, you've got most of the audience on your side anyway.

I'm fortunate in having journalism as a sideline to pay the bills, and I essentially do it in order to take as long as I want with books.

When I read a book I liked, I would get a pen and one of my father's legal pads and rewrite it from memory as if I had thought of it myself. It was a clear sign that I wanted to be involved in writing, even if it was just pretend at that point.

When I was 10, my father had to go to the local library to sign a release form stating that I was allowed to borrow books from the adult section.

I don't sign contracts for my books.

While writing books about the past, I think about the present. It's not intentional, but somehow my books end up being written under the sign of a political mood.

When I interviewed Paul Bremer in his office, he had almost no books on his shelves. He had a couple of management books, like 'Leadership' by Rudolph Giuliani. I didn't take it as an encouraging sign.

My only regret is that I signed away the world rights and in America they've been far and away my most successful books, but I never saw a cent from any of it.

I've never been a collector - just a consumer - and these days unless a book is signed to me by another author, I don't normally have any qualms about passing it to a friend or donating it to the library.

I love signing the books; it's so exciting to see my readers in person.

People who hate me call me a Twitter troll, which is laughable given my extensive body of work, which you can find on Amazon in the form of books like 'Gorilla Mindset' and my documentary on free speech, 'Silenced.'

The first Amy Silver book was commissioned, and they were not books that came completely from me. They weren't necessarily the sort of books I read, and although I enjoyed doing them very much, and they were great training, I never felt completely comfortable in that genre.

I have always loved animals, and as a child, I read a lot of horse books. I had a particular favorite called 'Silver Snaffles' that my mother gave away.

In my own work, I don't have favorite characters, but I have characters that I relate to the most. And I relate the most to Simon from 'The Mortal Instruments,' and also Tessa from 'The Infernal Devices.' They're more sort of bookish and shy characters.

You know, you don't expect everyone to be as educated as everyone else or have the same achievements, but you expect at least to be offered at least some of the opportunities, and libraries are the most simple and the most open way to give people access to books.

It is much simpler to buy books than to read them and easier to read them than to absorb their contents.