Malcolm Gladwell Quotes

Some say it is the elements of hope and wonder in children's books that make them special. But there are many dark young adult novels these days. Adults loved Harry Potter, though it was written for the young. In the end, it is probably up to the reader of any age to decide if this book is for him or her.

I'm not over-enamored of complicated books, and wonder if it's more for the author's ego than anything else?

I don't write for any particular kind of person.

I don't like super-descriptive modern fiction. I like, "Here's what was happening in 1582 all over the planet." Then that gets my imagination going.

We don't read novels to have an experience like life. Heck, we're living lives, complete with all the incompleteness. We turn to fiction to have an author assure us that it means something.

The style of writing required in the great world is distinguished by a free and daring grace, a careless security, a fine and sharp polish, a delicate and perfect taste; while that fitted for the people is characterized by a vigorous natural fulness, a profound depth of feeling, and an engaging naivete.

I read Betty Smith's "A Tree Grows in Brooklyn," all of Shirley Jackson's books, which I loved.

I also really like to read good books and I don't have enough time to do it. So it's really hard for me to imagine willingly submitting myself to a trilogy of books that I've been told are at the fourth grade reading level which isn't a very nice thing to say but.

Many persons read and like fiction. It does not tax the intelligence and the intelligence of most of us can so ill afford taxation that we rightly welcome any reading matter which avoids this.

You're not going to stay in business, the business of making movies very long because you need the resources in order to keep going. So you have to try and find a niche audience or some kind of audience that has the same likes, dislikes and aesthetic sensibilities that you have.

I just try to put the thing out and hope somebody will read it. Someone says: 'Whom do you write for?' I reply: 'Do you read me?' If they say 'Yes,' I say, 'Do you like it?' If they say 'No,' then I say, 'I don't write for you.'

Honestly, when you start talking about genres, you're talking as much about the business side of writing as anything else. Certainly there are elements of reader expectation that play into various genres, and those are important, but it also becomes about packaging, placement, audience....In the end, I'm not a fan of labels. I think the best fiction blurs the boundaries between genres, stretches and breaks them.

I don't have an ideal reader. I'm trying to reach something simple and, I believe, universal, in every single person.

In America, instead of making the audience come to the film, the idea seems to be for you to go to the audience. They come up with the demographics for the film and then the film is made and sold strictly to that audience.

I don't like to read novelizations of movies.

I would sooner read a timetable or a catalog than nothing at all.

Taste is to literature what bon ton is in society.

I've always assumed from the beginning that I had relatively few contemporaries among my readership. Not that I was consciously writing for a younger audience but that what I was doing interested a younger audience, or at least threatened them less.

Even the most careful and expensive marketing plans cannot sell people a book they don't want to read.

I do not write for the public. You are my public and I hope to convert you.

Full House was a show that was done for ten-year-olds. The critics hated it. They said terrible, terrible things about it. But it should have been reviewed by ten-year-olds. That's who it was made for. They loved it. And if they loved it, great. Why the hell does a fifty-year-old guy working at a big newspaper have to tell me I'm a piece of crap?

There are some things that are more appropriate to a children's than an adult book but there's a huge overlapping area and most kids read an age group up anyway.

The selective instinct of the artist tells him when his language should be homely, and when it should be more elevated; and it is precisely in the imperceptible blending of the plain with the ornate that a great writer is distinguished. He uses the simplest phrases without triviality, and the grandest without a suggestion of grandiloquence.

The grand stye arises in poetry, when a noble nature, poetically gifted, treats with simplicity or with severity a serious subject.

I am so constituted that I had rather read bad stuff than nothing.