Louis Sachar Quotes

I'll never forget a meeting with one publisher where they said, 'We don't publish books for teenage boys; teenage boys don't read.'

I don't think too much about the audience when I'm writing... I'm aware that 'Holes' was read by kids as young as 8, up to adults.

I don't think about who the audience is for my books.

The process of writing a book is so removed in my mind from the process of publishing it that I often forget for great stretches that I eventually hope to do the latter.

I never wrote my books especially for children.

Publishing a book is a very different thing than writing one.

Books are such quiet things - created in silence, read in silence - yet publishing a book has become a very noisy business. I've been noisy, too. I felt like I had to be in order to connect with my readers.

My first YA novel, not many people have read. It's a fickle business. There's a degree of timing and luck involved.

Overall, one of the things that excites me most about self-publishing is that the highest-value use of my time in promoting the books will be found in writing more of them.

I was definitely meant to be a young adult author, and I love it - I'm here to stay!

When I wrote 'Marley & Me,' I had a clear audience in mind. And it did not include children. I wrote my book for adults and assumed only adults, and possibly teenagers, would be drawn to it.

I want to write a best-selling book.

No matter how well a person writes, a successful book is a team effort involving many, many people.

I do send out information about my books. Very few people buy the books that way, but I always feel that if they want to know more about the process, they can get the information from my books.

If I sit down to write a young-adult novel, then I'm going to write either to the punch-pulling expectation of what I can't do, or I'm going to go the other way and think about what can I sneak in to be 'down with the kids' - which would be excruciating.

I'm very privy to the way bookstores work, and I think a lot about the ecosystem that my books have been published in. I think it's great to be aware of how publishing works.

There's always that discussion about fiction about how do you market it - these are books for boys, these are books for girls, these are books for adults. Actually, they're just stories, and if they're good stories, then they surpass those boundaries.

I don't think I consciously decided to write for the young adult audience; my subconscious decided for me.

In 2008, when I wrote Book 1 and Book 2, the head of the publishing house suggested twelve books - one each month. For practical reasons, that didn't work out.

The TV audience is way bigger than a book audience, and no matter what I do, I'm always thinking if this will help people read my books.

All I can say is, I don't encourage younger kids to read my books, and actually, the biggest age group on my Facebook page is 25- to 35-year-old women.

Calling a book 'young adult' is only important in that it can help get a book to the right reader. After that, it's a useless abstraction and should be discarded.

I wrote my first book when I was 15 years old. And my second book '1,2,3 Publish Me!' shows everyone how writing a book is done in just the three secret editing levels I discovered!

I wanted to write a book specifically aimed toward young people. I wanted to write a book that anybody can read and enjoy, but I did want to aim it at young people and, even more specifically, urban young people.

If I'm writing books, I'm a 'New York Times' bestseller - how do I do it all? I don't know.