I'd rather write one good book than ten mediocre ones.
No one ever committed suicide while reading a good book, but many have tried while trying to write one.
I don't read books regularly, because I'm always writing them. I've written 30 books, thousands of pages.
I started writing to get women, or rather a particular woman, and I continue writing because it’s now a compulsion.
To have touched the feet of Christ is no excuse for mistakes in punctuation. If a man writes well only when he's drunk, then I'll tell him: Get drunk. And if he says that it's bad for his liver, I'll answer: What's your liver? A dead thing that lives...
Work freely and rollickingly as though you were talking to a friend who loves you. Mentally (at least three or four times a day) thumb your nose at all know-it-alls, jeerers, critics, doubters.
I've tried to reduce profanity but I reduced so much profanity when writing the book that I'm afraid not much could come out. Perhaps we will have to consider it simply as a profane book and hope that the next book will be less profane or perhaps mor...
A bad book and good marketing won't work, the same way a good book and bad marketing will also not work. There is no choice in the matter that if you need to write a good book, you also need to have good marketing for it.
I wrote my first sucio story, as I call them, in 1997. This was always my 'cheater's book,' my book about sucios desgraciados. My plan was to write a book about how people deal with love and loss.
People always ask what a book is about, as if it has to be about something. I don't want to write books that lend themselves to that sort of description. My books are more a kind of breaking-down.
I think every writer has a book that haunts them, and on some level, every book you write is a reaction to it. 'Lolita' is that book for me. Nabokov's love of wordplay, descriptive detail, artfully complex plots, and his themes of obsession and lost ...
But real life is not art.
Every book I've read appears in my writing.
When I read it, I don't wince, which is all I ever ask for a book I write.
I write books I'd enjoy reading, I'm the reader standing behind my shoulder.
You have to write the book that wants to be written. And if it's too difficult for grown-ups, you write it for children.
You cannot write for children They're much too complicated. You can only write books that are of interest to them.
We have talked long enough in this country about equal rights. It is time now to write the next chapter - and to write it in the books of law.
Not everyone can write a book or paint a picture or write a symphony, but almost anyone can fall in love. There is something almost miraculous in that.
I don't think there was a particular book that made me want to write. They all did. I always wanted to write.
Write and keep writing, not because people will like it, but because someone may get a kick out of thrashing your book.
