Quotes About Books

My ideal viewer is an 11-year-old girl who, like me, was once reading a book by Jean Plaidy and might be in the position of deciding what to make of the world and what to do with her life.

Until I read Anne Frank's diary, I had found books a literal escape from what could be the harsh reality around me. After I read the diary, I had a fresh way of viewing the both literature and the world. From then on, I found I was impatient with books that were not honest or that were trivial and frivolous.

All my books are adventures, but they also have a social viewpoint.

The views I have, the books I write, are read as political, or even as manifestos.

Unfortunately writers take a very small part of the profit on their books, and I think in the e-book world there is a real danger they will take even less, unless they are vigilant and robust about protecting their own interests.

People would go from village to village with their books in a time of poverty and disease. They would get people around them, and for an hour, these storytellers would change people's lives. I'd always thought I was a reincarnation of that. That's who I want to be.

There are two things that I really love; vintage clothing and books. Mash the two together and I pretty much peak on personal joy levels.

I have a vintage bohemian style of decor with a lot of candles, and second hand furniture and my crystals and my books and plants.

I always have been and will remain someone who loves real, 3D, substantial books. And I don't believe that it's a wistful, nostalgic interest like vinyl collectors. It's not the same thing.

One of the biggest challenges of writing for middle-grade or even young-adult readers is that I don't want to have too much violence in it - which really limits what you can do. It's important that they're not just bloodbaths or glorifying violence. I always try to show that a person who dies leaves a hole. There's grief in my books.

Two things I do well in books are sex and violence, but I don't want gratuitous sex or violence. The sex and violence are only as graphic as need be. And never included unless it furthers the plot or character development.

In my books, I never portray violence as a reasonable solution to a problem. If the lead characters in the story are driven to it, it's at the extreme end of their experience.

My work is less violent because we tend to write what we want to read... and I'm not that interested in gruesome books. Any violence, to fit in well with a crime novel, has to have compassion.

I read about violent things. I think what I get out of that is entertainment by learning about different things, and reading the genre and getting an understanding of motivations. But at the end of the day, it's still a book, and I can walk away.

I think the kind of unexpected I really love is when you open books and the actual way of writing is different and interesting. Like reading Virginia Woolf for the first time or Lawrence Durrell for the first time.

When I was growing up, my house was filled with books. My mother was an educator, and my father was a history buff, so our home was a virtual library, covering every author from Beverly Cleary to James Michener.

Estimates are that in 2012, more than 32 million books were available - the explosion, thanks to the ease of self-publishing; 2013 could see even more titles grace our virtual bookstores! That means we are going to be awash in covers and titles, plot descriptions and characters.

I think a lot of people have an idea of virtual reality from science fiction, books and movies that have been out over the last couple of decades.

By virtue of some of the ways the game is played, in terms of message discipline, in terms of access for reporters, and especially in the way that sources and subjects, especially famous subjects, treat the media, almost by default there's more news that's falling into books.

One of the nice things about books as opposed to television and movies to some extent is it's not a passive entertainment. People really do get involved, and they do create, and they do have their own visions of what different characters look like and what should happen. It's great - it means their brains are working.

I feel, holding books, accommodating their weight and breathing their dust, an abiding love. I trust them, in a way that I can't trust my computer, though I couldn't do without it. Books are matter. My books matter. What would I have done through these years without the library and all its lovely books?

Books are all right, but dead men's brains are no good unless you mix a live one's with them.

More and more I lived in books, they were my comfort, refuge, addiction, compensation for the humiliations that attended contact with the world outside.

Latin [...], it was the sign of being able to detach yourself from here and now, abstract your understanding of words, train your memory and live solitary in your head with only books for company. So it was meant to be hard, but I found it wonderfully easy, for just these reasons. I fell in love with Latin.