Sally Mann Quotes

To me, the nicest luxury would be to have a room where I could keep all my books in one place - and have space for more.

I give novels as gifts, and there is nothing I like to receive more as a gift.

Generally, I read nonfiction. There's very little fiction that I enjoy enough to spend my time reading. I am generally a nonfiction guy.

Through his long, productive career, Paul Theroux has mixed nonfiction books about exotic travel with novels set in exotic places. Africa, Singapore, Hong Kong, Honduras - he lives in and writes about places most of us never see.

Take a look at the books other people have in their homes.

I love reading. I'm fortunate enough to have signed books by Faulkner, Steinbeck, Thomas Pynchon.

I read all of the nonfiction that I could find on Chechnya, and all the while, I was searching for a novel that was set there. I couldn't find a single novel written in English that was set in the period of the two most recent Chechen wars.

I grew up around books - my grandmother's house, where I lived as a small child, was full of books. My father was a history teacher, and he loved the Russian novels. There were always books around.

I have read a number of books, starting with novels, that I particularly liked.

In design-speak, 'a library' means a room lined with books, floor-to ceiling, but it all depends on the space you have. You may have a free-standing bookshelf of your favorite books if that's all you have room for.

What I did do a lot as a child was read, and I particularly remember reading all the 'Hardy Boys' books, a set of history books called the 'Landmark Books,' and a series of science books called the 'All About Books.'

I long ago ran out of bookshelf space and so, like a museum with its art, simply rotate my books from the boxes to the shelves and back again.

My whole thing is, I collect what I know I want to read, and I have certain bookshelves in my bedroom that contain all the books I haven't read yet.

Travel books are, by and large, boring. They lodge uncomfortably between fact, fiction and autobiography.

I have different books for different times of the day, let alone different seasons of the year!

Got an hour or two? That's all it takes for one of my books.

In college, I wrote newspaper articles and songs. Then, on my 21st birthday, I sold my first book. It was a nonfiction book about women pirates - 'Pirates in Petticoats.' After that, I was a book writer for good.

Don't give me books for Christmas; I already have a book.

The thing with bookshelves, no matter how many you have, you always fill them.

I don't read that many novels, I'm more of a nonfiction fan.

I think that's not a question that one can answer accurately. I read a whole range of books, quite a lot of history at the time, and still do read a lot. I read very widely.

A strike bulletin or an impassioned leaflet are of more moment than three hundred pretty and faultlessly written pages about the private woes of a gigolo or the biological ferment of a society dame…

I much prefer writing fiction. History books, for me, are very hard work, very serious.

Writing fiction is very different to writing non-fiction. I love writing novels, but on history books, like my biographies of Stalin or Catherine the Great or Jerusalem, I spend endless hours doing vast amounts of research. But it ends up being based on the same principle as all writing about people: and that is curiosity!

For a while, gently bumping into my nightstand meant a pile of 50 books clattering onto my head and the floor. After the 10th time this happened, I moved most of the books to a shelf in the spare room. Now, my nightstand is sort of like a bookish country club. And not all books get in.