Chris Abani Quotes

I had no idea how long books were supposed to be.

You will, I am sure, agree with me that... if page 534 only finds us in the second chapter, the length of the first one must have been really intolerable.

People hate good books to be over. I wish I could write a 700-page book.

I'm a big believer in big books, and that doesn't necessarily mean long books.

Most novels, I find, are three times longer than they need to be. Very little happens, and I don't want to waste my time with them.

Nobody wants to read a 600 page book in which the author is fabulous throughout.

Nearly all novels are too long.

Many books are longer than they seem. They have indeed no end. The boredom that they cause is truly absolute and infinite.

A novel is a book with a lot of pages.

If I wanted to be bored by 6,000 pages of unreadable dreck, I'd read War and Peace four times.

I was reading this James Bond book, and right away I realized that, like most books, it had too many words.

You know what writers say about their long books: If I had another year, the book would be half as long.

I basically wrote five books with 'Night Soldiers,' called them novellas, and came in with a 600-page manuscript.

There's not too much difference between writing a picture book and writing a collection of a hundred poems or so, except that the bigger books take a lot longer to do.

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

Size has nothing to do with literature. All legs are long enough to touch the ground, and all books are big enough to fill their covers.

That seems to be the definition of 'novel' for me: a story that hasn't yet discovered a way to be brief.

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

A reviewer's lot is not always an easy one. I can remember flogging myself to finish Harold Brodkey's 'The Runaway Soul' despite the novel's consummate, unmitigated tedium.

Granted, a long book can be as daunting as a hard one. I nearly reached for 'Game of Thrones' until I saw the bookshelf sagging under the burden of those other volumes.

I have personally seen statements that were longer than some books I have read.

I'm struggling with what is epic. People decided I was epic - if by epic, do you mean a big, heavy book? 'David Copperfield' is a big book - is it epic? Amount of time covered, length, drama, or story - that's the real appeal - if the story is long you have a better chance of becoming more connected.

I am trying to give the best performance possible in 400 pages. I want readers to be scared; I want them to be moved. Entertainment doesn't necessarily mean something trivial, but it does mean people wanting to get to the end of a book.

How often one reads a contemporary full-length novel and thinks quietly, mutinously, that it would have worked out better at half or a third the length.

'Jonathan Strange & Mr. Norrell' by Susanna Clarke is a big, thick book. About a thousand pages in paperback. I've heard several people say the size alone intimidated them.