Quotes About Books

I like to get suggestions on what to read. I'll look at Twitter, people I like, people I admire... I'll go and research the book, download it on my phone and read it while I'm on the road.

All coffee shops now have WiFi. Why bring a book when you could be wittily attacking some idiot columnist on Twitter, or responding to your date requests, or posting a picture of your foot? All of that is more gripping and immediate and social than books.

The most important thing is readers. I've got a huge Twitter following, but I don't really think it sells books; I don't think a huge Facebook following sells books - although these things aren't bad, of course.

I read a lot for me. But I'm not one of those people who gets 'The New York Times' book review and runs out and buys 10 books and is done with them and passing them out to friends, you know, two weeks later.

Not as ours the books of old - Things that steam can stamp and fold; Not as ours the books of yore - Rows of type, and nothing more.

When you get pregnant, you start reading pregnancy books. Everything has been pretty textbook. It's amazing how they can say, 'This week, this might happen,' and it kind of does. I had typical nausea the first trimester, which was no fun. And extreme tiredness.

My parents read me some typical children's books: 'Green Eggs and Ham,' 'The Little Engine That Could,' 'Peter Rabbit.' But I quickly developed a preference for nonfiction books about baseball and math, by the likes of Bill James and Martin Gardner.

When I was starting to write, I was fascinated with 'Knuffle Bunny' by Mo Willems. I remember taking it home and typing it out, trying to figure out how it worked. It's just a classic, with dauntingly few words.

My father was a tyrant about reading, and that put me off books when I was little.

Digital books are still painfully ugly and weirdly irritating to interact with. They look like copies of paper, but they can't be designed or typeset in the same way as paper, and however splendid the cover images may look on a hi-res screen, they're still images rather than physical things.

The biggest markets for my books outside the UK are France and Italy, and those are the two countries where I also have the closest personal relationships with my translators - I don't know whether that's a coincidence, or if there's something to be learned from it.

Libraries are the ultimate restaurants for brain food. I sleep better knowing there are libraries. I would take a bullet for a librarian.

Marvel books also feed into the smaller publishers and the fact that this is happening in the same month we're launching Ultimate Fantastic Four is no coincidence.

The genre of narrative business books that I love so much - the ones that have a you-are-there quality - was invented, or so it is said, in 1982 by David McClintick, who wrote 'Indecent Exposure,' a rollicking good read about a Hollywood scandal and the ultimate boardroom power struggle at Columbia Pictures.

Productivity is a relative matter. And it's really insignificant: What is ultimately important is a writer's strongest books.

Productivity is a relative matter. And it's really insignificant: What is ultimately important is a writer's strongest books. It may be the case that we all must write many books in order to achieve a few lasting ones - just as a young writer or poet might have to write hundreds of poems before writing his first significant one.

I take books on learning to bed - music theory, colour theory - and usually my brain thinks, 'Um, I think I'd rather turn off,' than learn something.

If I'm home with no chore at hand, and a package of books has come, the television set and the chess board and the unanswered mail will have to manage without me if one of the books is a detective story.

There are a million great books out there if you just go to Google. There's a lot to pull apart. A lot of crazy, unbelievable stuff that's all completely true. I get into little obsessions, and I read everything I can find on one thing, and then I move onto another.

Jeff Kinney is tall and has a great smile, but don't be fooled, he's as slick as they come. A real player. And how he came up with a book that appeals to kids ages 8-13 baffles me. He's an unbelievably kind man with a great family.

Books are the legacies that a great genius leaves to mankind, which are delivered down from generation to generation as presents to the posterity of those who are yet unborn.

I can think of no other writer who so thoroughly embodies the Jamesian spirit as Alison Lurie. Like him she can excavate all the possibilities of a theme. Like his, her books seem long, unbroken threads, seamless progressions of effects.

But, indeed, we prefer books to pounds; and we love manuscripts better than florins; and we prefer small pamphlets to war horses.

Most books, after all, are ephemeral; their specifics, several years later, inspire about as much interest as daily battle reports from the Hundred Years' War.