Quotes on Books

I went to an extreme for literary purposes because I felt all the self-help books out there were so gooey and Pollyanna-ish and nauseating. It was making me angry.

With each book I write, I become more and more convinced that the books have a life of their own, quite apart from me.

I got my love of animals from the Dr. Doolittle books and my love of Africa from the Tarzan novels. I remember my mum taking me to the first Tarzan film, which starred Johnny Weissmuller, and bursting into tears. It wasn't what I had imagined at all.

If you want to write serious books, you must be ready to break the forms, break the forms.

I write my books at moments of shock. I meet people in extremis and their stories are highly emotionally charged.

Books that you carry to the fire, and hold readily in your hand, are most useful after all.

Publishers like a good buzz, and negative responses sell books just as well as positive ones.

Books are alive, you see. They're not dead, they're alive.

There's books that are about places we will never go, and then there's books that inspire us to go.

I don't look at my old work. I mean, they made nice books; the books were made without me, the one from last year and the one from this year. I - personally, I'm not interested in my own past. I'm only interested in today - perhaps tomorrow.

Books externalise our brains and turn our homes into thinking bodies.

An aging writer has the not insignificant satisfaction of a shelf of books behind him that, as they wait for their ideal readers to discover them, will outlast him for a while.

Even though I read voraciously as a child, I never saw myself in books. Without narratives to expand my ideas of who I could be, I accepted the stories others told me about myself, stories which diminished and belittled me and people like me. I want to write against that.

If I can write it, I can cope. And I've been writing many books, but in every book, I try to explore something in my own soul that I need to solve, I need to understand.

I speak English and Spanish. I write in Spanish; my books are published in English.

The moment your kid's born you realize no one knows anything. No one goes to classes. You just have a kid. You can read all the books you like, but unfortunately none of our kids have read the books so they don't care. You're basically making it up as you go along.

There are plenty of books that tell you how to become a writer, but not one that suggests how, if you want a normal life, you might reverse the process.

Books arrive in my head all at once, and then it becomes an 18-month process of getting it all down on paper.

Books are in no hurry. An act of creation is in no hurry; it reads us, it privileges us infinitely. The notion that it is the occasion for our cleverness fills me with baffled bitterness and anger.

If you want to help arm the schools, arm them with school supplies, books, therapists - things they actually need and can make use of.

I take inspiration from books, movies, television, music - it all goes in the hopper. Depending on the project, I'm drawing from this or that piece of art that has stayed with me. Toni Morrison, George Romero, Sonic Youth - they are all in there.