Long Book Quotes

I think shorter books are going to become more and more of the trend. So I don't think you have to write big, big, long books.

What I would really love to happen to me would be if I came upon an idea that would keep me busy until I die so I wouldn't have to go through the business of thinking up a new book. But I wouldn't mind writing a long book which is going to occupy me for the rest of my life.

Once I start reading something, I can't stop. I obsessively read, which is a problem with long books!

I wouldn't mind writing a long book which is going to occupy me for the rest of my life.

I love to read long books. I enjoy experiencing that extension. But it's not something I feel comfortable with and not something I think I can gain comfort with by practice. It was a real struggle for me while writing memoir to get past three pages or so. In poems, I can write long poems. But length in prose: no.

In a way, the main fault of all books is that they are too long.

Make no mistake, those who write long books have nothing to say. Of course those who write short books have even less to say.

I cannot write long books; I leave that for those who have nothing to say.

One always tends to overpraise a long book, because one has got through it.

If you imagine writing 1,000 words a day, which most journalists do, that would be a very long book a year.

But I too hate long books: the better, the worse. If they're bad they merely make me pant with the effort of holding them up for a few minutes. But if they're good, I turn into a social moron for days, refusing to go out of my room, scowling and growling at interruptions, ignoring weddings and funerals, and making enemies out of friends. I still bear the scars of Middlemarch.

When I used to play golf. It's a terrible miserable game. It's incredibly frustrating. In 18 holes you make 150 horrible shots off in the woods, in the water...You make one good shot and it brings you back the next time. With writing a long book there has to be at least one bit that has some magic in it that you can go back to.

I often feel newspapers are just filling up space. Of course, I also know people who write really long books.

I'm still happy with the way Einstein's Dreams came out. That book came out of a single inspiration. I really felt like I was not creating the words, that I was hearing the words. That someone else was speaking the words to me and I was just writing them down. It was a very strange experience. That can happen with a short book. I don't think it could happen with a long book.

The Little Friend is a long book. It's also completely different from my first novel: different landscape, different characters, different use of language and diction, different approach to story.

I was afraid you had deceased,' he said. 'Or gotten engrossed in a long book.

Creativity doesn’t come from glancing quickly at your Twitter feed while in line at Starbucks. It comes from deep thought. It comes from voraciously reading books—long books that require focused attention. It comes from meaningful discourse with other intellectually curious people. It comes from listening and asking good questions.

Books go out into the world, travel mysteriously from hand to hand, and somehow find their way to the people who need them at the times when they need them ... Cosmic forces guide such passings-along.

Writing long books is a laborious and impoverishing act of foolishness: expanding in five hundred pages an idea that could be perfectly explained in a few minutes. A better procedure is to pretend that those books already exist and to offer a summary, a commentary.

Work ethic is one of the biggest things my father taught me. That man worked like every day, every day, 9 to 5, well 9 to 9 in his case, but he would treat it as if it was a 9 to 5 job. He would clock in. He would put in his hours. That is how you can write those you know incredibly long books that unfortunately there is not much market for anymore, but that is also how you can explore an idea on a deeper level than we get in our media surface these days. It's tough.

Every book for me is a chapter in the long book which will finally be closed on the day of my death.

Long books, when read, are usually overpraised, because the reader wishes to convince others and himself that he has not wasted his time.

I think that the economics of book publishing favor hits with long book runs. You make all your money on the last bunch of books, not the first.

[Lincoln in the Bardo] is not a long book. And that meant I could obsess over it and live in it both backwards and forwards and hyper-control everything.

Recently, the science fiction writer Arthur C. Clarke talked about the ways the lives of human beings will be changed in the next century. At least half of them I didn't understand at all, though I'm sure that kids today would know exactly what he meant. I'm somewhere in the past. I do think, however, that our brains have been damaged by technology. I meet kids who don't seem to be capable of reading a long sentence, much less a long book.

People who rarely read long books, or even short stories, still appreciate the greatest examples of the shortest literary genres. I have long been fascinated by these short genres. They seem to lie just where my heart is, somewhere between literature and philosophy.

In the learned journal, in the influential newspaper, I discern no form; only some irresponsible shadow; oftener some monied corporation, or some dangler, who hopes, in the mask and robes of his paragraph, to pass for somebody. But through every clause and part of speech of the right book I meet the eyes of the most determined men; his force and terror inundate every word: the commas and dashes are alive; so that the writing is athletic and nimble,--can go far and live long.

My greatest wish — other than salvation — was to have a book. A long book with a never-ending story. One I could read again and again, with new eyes and a fresh understanding each time.

If people don't read, that's their choice; a lifelong book habit may itself be some sort of affliction.

Nobody believes me when I say that my long book is an attempt to create a world in which a form of language agreeable to my personal aesthetic might seem real. But it is true.