Lionel Shriver Quotes

When we talk about good books, we often talk about good sentences, but what we rarely talk about is reader pleasure. Yet it is reader pleasure that is going to make a book break out into the kind of success that makes it into a household name.

Actually, I love trying to figure out why certain books become hits while others, which may be just as good, have trouble finding an audience.

The bewildering success of my books continues to surprise me.

You don't need to be able to string a sentence together in a way that is elegant or even vaguely meaningful to produce a bestseller - as Dan Brown has demonstrated time and again.

There was a sense that there was a lot of word of mouth happening with 'The Memory Keeper's Daughter,' even in hardcover.

As an author, I love to know my book sells really well.

When 'The Shadow of the Wind' became a success I had already been a working writer, I'd been through the ups and downs, I'd seen how it worked.

I think it's a very ephemeral thing, what makes a show a success.

A best-seller is the golden touch of mediocre talent.

A best-seller was a book which somehow sold well because it was selling well.

Hemingway hated me. I sold 200 million books, and he didn't. Of course most of mine sold for 25 cents, but still... you look at all this stuff with a grain of salt.

I wanted to highlight that whole dreadful process in book publishing that 'nothing succeeds like success.'

The marketability, the success of a book, ultimately rests with whether or not people will find the concept/characters/title/cover appealing.

'Wild at Heart' created a set of expectations maybe, partly, on my part, certainly on my publisher's part, but also in the world out there, that my next books would be as remarkable.

My second book, Follow Me Down had some success, got good critical notices, went into a second printing and things like that, but Shiloh was by far the most successful of those first five novels.

I want my books to sell, to be read. I'm not interested in being obscure.

If something is successful with the audience, it's automatically suspect; the reverse is to say that not to reach audiences is the greatest compliment an artist can receive!

Ideally, I'd like to have a movie that people like and makes money.

I'm always surprised when large numbers of people buy my books.

Obviously Spawn was at the top of the charts at that point so you get a lot of opportunities.

I've made movies where people say it's their favourite, but they don't take it seriously because it just didn't seem to break through commercially.

The success of 'Those Who Save Us' had an interesting effect on the writing of 'The Stormchasers.'

Some books are well-received with critics; other books sell.

No one knows why books do well.

To what extent a film works is beyond me. My first film 'Aashiq Banaya Aapne' did wonders at the box office. Then 'Chocolate' was also quite popular, but it didn't have the same effect as the first one.