Ben Schott Quotes

Actually, I love trying to figure out why certain books become hits while others, which may be just as good, have trouble finding an audience.

Attending a book group is always a salutary experience for a writer. There's no guarantee that the people there will have enjoyed your book, and, as anyone who has taken part in a book group will know, half the fun is in ripping a book you haven't liked to shreds.

It's nice being married to someone who likes to read because you can indulge in geeky conversations about books.

I mean, when you're tired of book reviews, you're tired of life.

What I enjoy about reviewing and writing for newspapers and periodicals is simply the chance to talk about all kinds of books and lots of them.

Seeing people who are actually reading your book and listening to the wide variety of reactions they have to it, is really special.

I've always been fascinated by books. When I was young, my grandfather used to hand out a book - which would be anything from a biography to a classic - to me every week and ask me to write a piece on what I thought about it. On the other hand, my mother used to love reading thrillers and bestsellers.

I receive about 10,000 letters a year from readers, and in the first year after a book is published, perhaps 5,000 letters will deal specifically with that piece of work.

I don't think of myself as a critic at all. I'm a reviewer and essayist. I mainly hope to share with others my pleasure in the books and authors I write about, though sometimes I do need to cavil and point out shortcomings.

Writers should be read, but neither seen nor heard.

Nothing induces me to read a novel except when I have to make money by writing about it. I detest them.

Being a writer in Iceland, you get rewarded all the time: People really do read our books, and they have opinions; they love them, or they hate them. At the average Christmas party, people push politics and the Kardashians aside and discuss literature.

I'm the world's worst at reading reviews and then pretending I've read the book.

Because so many people use goodreads, it is an amazingly good—and amazingly underutilized—resource for understanding what people read, why, and how they feel about their reading experiences.

People like to complain about the state of contemporary literature, but I can only assume they don't read it very widely.

I think I'm much more comfortable talking about other books than my own!

I love doing readings. I could really give a crap about reviews. It's kind of about the readers.

I don't think anybody reads a book of poetry front to back. Editors and reviewers only. I don't think anybody else does.

Reading isn't about managing expectations. In certain ways, writing is. You're trying to send signals early in a book about what might be coming later, but I think worrying about the kind of chatter around a book is something I try and stay as far away from when I'm reading.

We shouldn't teach great books; we should teach a love of reading. Knowing the contents of a few works of literature is a trivial achievement. Being inclined to go on reading is a great achievement.

It's a novel experience to have one of my books read by a reading group.

I deeply respect literature and expect to gain insight from a book and to identify emotionally with its characters. I therefore avoid reading suspense novels or science fiction.

Sometimes my readers ask me what else they should read, and I recommend Sebald.

My two goals are to read everything Edith Wharton has ever written and to have an art collection.

I've found that writers who don't read really can't write.