Tom Robbins Quotes

My first novel, 'You Lost Me There,' has been described as a beach read. Tough bracket, beach reads. There's not much room for mistakes when you're competing against the sun for a person's attention.

You know, I read graphic novels but not encyclopedically.

I do realize that I am a popular writer who people buy to take on vacation. I'm an escapist kind of writer.

I tend to read things that are a little more on the nourishing side. But if I don't enjoy something, I'll put it down.

There's nothing like taking Proust to the beach and daydreaming along to it.

Mr Michener, as timeless as a stack of 'National Geographics,' is the ultimate Summer Writer. Just as one goes back to the cottage in Maine, so one goes back to one's Michener.

If I like a book, I tend to read the author's entire collection. But I choose mainly through personal recommendations, general word of mouth and book reviews.

People who don't normally read make an exception for my books, possibly because they're short.

If a child wants to read 'Twilight' over Middlemarch, they should be encouraged - the important thing is to get them reading in the first place.

I do try not to spend much time reading in the suspense genre.

I'm reading a lot of different books, but I always think I have to switch it up a little bit. It's like food - everything in moderation, same with my books, same with my reading. You read books that are good for you and you learn a lot of stuff, then you read 'Fifty Shades of Grey,' which is like candy.

My summer reading suggestion: Pick a really famous, really long novel.

That literary-popular distinction is, in my view, vastly overstated. At the far poles there are clearly books that are purely commercial and purely literary, written for audiences that want to see the same thing enacted over and over and over again. But the middle is where most people read and most people write.

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

I'm not that into reading. If I'm gonna read, I'm gonna read some cool sci-fi book or something, not some stupid self-help book.

My main source of reading is scripts, which doesn't leave a whole lot of room for books.

I read a lot, but I read about the areas that I'm interested in.

This next to never happens, but if I had time to sit on a beach and read, I wouldn't read a cozy. But I've read cozies. That's how I got interested in crime fiction: because my mother was a soft-boiled reader.

I like westerns, fantasy, sci-fi, graphic novels, thrillers, and I try to avoid the word 'genre' altogether. A good book is a good book.

I'm not going to give quotes about inventing the 'beach book,' but I was certainly at the forefront of it.

Pleasure reading has long been an American ideal - generations of schoolchildren have headed home for the summer toting recreational reading lists. But try to pitch it to a group of non-readers, and they quickly become suspicious.

I like feel-good fiction and mysteries.

I'm not someone who has a list of great books I would read if I only had the time. If I want to read a particular so-called classic, I go ahead and read it. If I had more time, I would certainly read more, but I'd read the way I always do - that is, I'd read whatever happened to interest me, not necessarily classics.

Wilbur Smith's novels make terrific holiday reading.

The 'beach read' has become such a ubiquitous concept in contemporary literature that we assume it has always been around. In fact, the term only emerged in the 1990s, usually in book trade publications such as 'Booklist' and 'Publisher's Weekly.'