Victor LaValle Quotes

There are books of which the backs and covers are by far the best parts.

I'll take any story if it's good.

There are good books and there are bad books, period, that's the distinction.

I wanted to see if I could write a good book.

I've got a big, long list of stuff you're entitled to hate about my books.

If you like my novels, I commend your good taste.

Most books are three-thirds rubbish.

I've never been a true fan of the short story and have only published a single example of my own.

A lot of times you get people writing wonderful sentences and paragraphs, and they fall in love with their prose style, but the stories really aren't that terrific.

I found some time ago that I have to be careful, while working on a novel, what I read.

I have always argued, in a good novel, interesting things happen to interesting people.

Any time you can take a book a little beyond the realm of pure entertainment, I think it's a good thing. But I don't really have it on my to-do list when I write a book. It just evolves naturally during the process of immersing yourself in a subject.

A good novel doesn't just transcend the boundaries of its target market - it knows nothing about target markets.

Very wonderful books might be published, and very terrible books might be published.

I had started to feel that somewhere in the second half of the 20th century, the idea of page-turning as a good thing had been lost. You were getting books that were the equivalent of absolutely beautifully prepared dishes of food that didn't taste like anything much.

A good novel tells us the truth about its hero; but a bad novel tells us the truth about its author.

To me, a book is a book. A novel is a novel, and you have hundreds of possibilities, options, and they may all be fine. Charles Dickens or Ingeborg Bachmann, Claude Simon or later writers. The one and only condition is that it has to be good: it has to have quality, substance, atmosphere.

When it comes to writers, I'm a huge fan of Ian McEwan. I've never taken a writing course, but reading and deconstructing his novels has been as good a lesson as any.

We sometimes received - and I would read - 200 manuscripts a week. Some of them were wonderful, some were terrible; most were mediocre. It was like the gifts of the good and bad fairies.

A good book, in the language of the book-sellers, is a salable one; in that of the curious, a scarce one; in that of men of sense, a useful and instructive one.

I'm no good at describing my books. 'Holes' has been out now for seven years, and I still can't come up with a good answer when asked what that book is about.

A book may be compared to your neighbor: if it be good, it cannot last too long; if bad, you cannot get rid of it too early.

I simply love writing good stories; that's my passion.

But even gold is not everything: and only a fanatic, and a rather foolish fanatic, would say that this style of fiction summed up and exhausted all the good that fiction could give and do.

Usually when I read something, first of all I'm looking for the story and then when I reread it, I'm sort of checking every part of it to see if every scene is necessary.