Freeman Dyson Quotes

To a great extent, I still write for myself, write what amuses me. Fortunately, I have a quirky sort of strange sense of humor that appeals to other people and that's good. I still sort of write for myself though there are some areas of the book I feel I have to put in and I feel I have to deliver.

If you tell certain people that you like Kerouac, they assume that's all you read, like you don't know anything else about literature. I recognize all the things that people dislike about the way he writes - his tone and the sentimentality of it all. But those books were there for me at a very important point in my life.

I am not sure I knew what I was doing, writing an "apocalypse" novel, when I started this book. Now that the book is done, I can own that I have in fact written an apocalypse novel, one that speculates on a dark, dark future. Why I did it, I really don't know - every time people read my work they comment on its darkness, its sadness.

Once you finish a book, it doesn't belong to you anymore. You're giving it to other people. If something in what a writer writes can excite the imagination and the feelings of the reader, then that reader carries it around forever. Nothing is more vivid than good fiction.

I write to entertain. When people read one of my books I want them to finish with a smile on their faces, feeling a little bit better about themselves and the people in their lives.

I thought, if I write a book that is not a retelling of Pride and Prejudice, it's not going to mean that I will not get any criticism. I might as well write the book that I want to write.

I both didn't know Owen [Suskind] beforehand and didn't have any connection to the autistic community. But Owen wasn't really a problem, because he participated in the writing of the book and wanted people to see him as he truly is. As far as the cameras, Owen lives in the moment and the cameras really didn't distract him.

The thing is that my first novel, which was basically a mystery adventure story, won quite an important award in Spain for young adult fiction, and because of this it became a very successful book, and right now it's some sort of a standard title, it's read widely in many high schools in Spain, so I think, in a way, I was a victim of my own success in the field of young adult fiction, because it was never my own natural register. I never intended to write that kind of fiction, but I became very successful at it.

The Israel stories were really hard for me to write, because I think that my book is very much about politics, but it isn't political. It really was important for me to not have a political agenda at all, because I have a hard time stomaching any political fiction that feels message-y.

People who were born alone are defined by feelings like "Who's gonna be with me when I die? Who will ever understand me? Will I always feel so alone? Maybe if I write a book..." and you forget that that doesn't help you so much.

Each book is, in a sense, an argument with myself, and I would write it, whether it is ever published or not.

Every book is, in an intimate sense, a circular-letter to the friends of him who writes it.

I'm not interested in writing for adults. I like them as people! I don't like the way they publish books in that world. Nothing ever gets a chance.

In terms of writing, I think what most fiction writers treasure more than anything is the feeling that they're living for the length of a book inside another person.

The only way to write a book, I’m fond of telling people, is to actually write a book. That’s how you write a book.

Money, after all, is an abstract artifact, like language - merely symbolized by the paper or coin or whatever. If you can fully grasp its abstractedness, especially in the computer age, it becomes quite clear that no group can monopolize this abstraction, except through a series of swindle. If the usurers had been bolder, they might have monopolized language as well as currency, and people would be saying we can't write more books because we don't have enough words, the way they now say we can't build starships, because we don't have enough money.

I think the books are the books. They were conceived as books. They weren't conceived as movies. When I write scripts, that's an idea and a situation that I think is a really good idea for a movie. When I'm writing a book, I'm not thinking, "Oh, this would be a great movie." This would be a very interesting book. And I think the books are things that cannot really be adapted into another medium.

I want a book to contain a world - indeed the world. Writing is my main means of engagement with the world and I want the scars of that engagement to be left in the language.

It's my contention that each book creates its own structure and its own length. I've written three or four slim books. It may be that the next novel is a big one, but I don't know.

If I knew what the meanings of my books were, I wouldn't have bothered to write them.

We have to tell the American public that they're missing the boat, that they have to get into writing and reading. Not only that, but books won't crash in the year 2000.

There is no substitute for practical experience, and if you want to write about people you ought to put down that comic book and go out and meet some of them rather than studying the way that Stan Lee or Chris Claremont depict people.

Write the best book you possibly can, then dedicate yourself to getting people to read it.

I tried to depict the human face of this history, I wanted to write a book that people would actually want to read.

I think that sense of unreality inspired me to write the story within the book that [August] Brill tells himself, one of the stories he tells himself.