Karl Wilhelm Friedrich Schlegel Quotes

The preface is the most important part of a book. Even reviewers read a preface.

nobody ever wrote to me saying"you know ender's game was a pretty good book, but you know what it really needs a n introduction!".....so be assured the novel stands on its own, and if you skip this intro and go straight to the story, i not only won't stand in your way i'll even agree with you!

The first sentence of a book is a promise.

The most important sentence in a good book is the first one; it will contain the organic seed from which all that follows will grow.

The book says [Lincoln in the Bardo],"I really need this sci-fi device of a ghost inhabiting another person." You say okay kind of begrudgingly. So the structure seemed informed by need and efficiency.

Books, too, begin like the week – with a day of rest in memory of their creation. The preface is their Sunday.

It's different to read a book for pleasure than to read it analytically. In the past, I'd read Pride and Prejudice for pleasure. This time, I was really looking at the structure, the order of events, how the characters interact with each other and how the book is paced.

The last thing that we find in making a book is to know what we must put first.

You can't expect that, after a poor fellow has written a book, he should also understand it.

The art of reading is the art of adopting the pace the author has set. Some books are fast and some are slow, but no book can be understood if it is taken at the wrong speed.

Tis the good reader that makes the good book; a good head cannot read amiss: in every book he finds passages which seem confidences or asides hidden from all else and unmistakeably meant for his ear.

Books are well written, or badly written. That is all.

I've never read a script that I've loved equally and differently to the book.

What do all my books have in common? A commitment to memory.

Sometime during your life—in fact, very soon—you may find yourself reading a book, and you may notice that a book’s first sentence can often tell you what sort of story your book contains.

A reader is entitled to believe what he or she believes is consonant with the facts of the book. It is not unusual that readers take away something that is spiritually at variance from what I myself experienced. That's not to say readers make up the book they want. We all have to agree on the facts. But readers bring their histories and all sets of longings. A book will pluck the strings of those longings differently among different readers.

Most books about writing are filled with bullshit. Fiction writers, present company included, don’t understand very much about what they do—not why it works when it’s good, not why it doesn’t when it’s bad.

A critic can only review the book he has read, not the one which the writer wrote.

The lesson intended by an author is hardly ever the lesson the world chooses to learn from his book.

The funniest novel you've never read. . . . Afternoon Men is a revelation to sophisticated readers of every stripe, but especially to a certain kind of artist manqu on the brink of discovering that life is a more difficult business than he ever had reason to expect. . . . The subject matter is 'relatable,' as my students like to say. Better still, though, is what you can learn about the craft of writing from this marvelous book. . . . Indeed, if you're looking for a funny, nonportentous Hemingway, then the early Powell is your man.

As a writer, you always read in two minds: You read as a reader and you enjoy it, and you look at it as a writer, and you just admire the architecture and the construction.

Let's go back, back to the Beginning.

The first of the Trainspotting crew to die. Out of the five of them like, Begbie, Renton, Spud, Sick Boy and [Margaret] Thatcher. Who'd have thunk she'd have been the first to go? She was the invisible author of the book, really. She created the conditions and the hubris whereby that whole culture flourished.

The Postman Always Rings Twice that's a book that I think every writer should read - that has to do with technique. But it's also a novel narrated by a guy who has decided by page 11 that he's fallen in love with a woman, and they're going to murder her husband so they can be together. There's nothing remotely likeable about him, but James M. Cain brings you so far into his head that, at a certain point, you have that uncomfortable but also thrilling sensation of seeing things exactly as he sees it.

The gender inequality in book reviewing isn't getting better. Male authors get the majority of review coverage, and male reviewers do most of the reviewing. It's kind of devastating.