Jennifer Carpenter Quotes

I read. I order books from the States. I literally go into bookstores, close my eyes, and take things off the shelf. If I don't like the book after a bit, I don't finish it. But I like to be surprised.

With all of their benefits, and there are many, one of the things I regret about e-books is that they have taken away the necessity of trawling foreign bookshops or the shelves of holiday houses to find something to read. I've come across gems and stinkers that way, and both can be fun.

I thought I'd go to a bookstore and see what moved me.

I travel a lot, so when I arrive in a city, I like to go to good local bookshops and make a selection based on how I'm feeling and what I'm thinking. The book I pick usually seems to have a definite karmic connection!

Reading is such a personal thing to me. I'd much rather give someone a gift certificate to a bookstore, and let that person choose his or her own books.

A reader's tastes are peculiar. Choosing books to read is like making your way down a remote and winding path. Your stops on that path are always idiosyncratic. One book leads to another and another the way one thought leads to another and another. My type of reader is the sort who burrows through the stacks in the bookstore or the library (or the Web site — stacks are stacks), yielding to impulse and instinct.

Some like to believe it's the book that chooses the person.

I try not to recommend too many books, frankly, because I think there's a certain synchronicity that happens when people discover books.

I was lucky enough to be given books that weren't top sellers; books that were kind of under the radar.

To see what books were available for my older students, I made many trips to the library. If a book looked interesting, I checked it out. I once went home with 30 books! It was then that I realized that kids' novels had the shape of real books, and I began to get ideas for young adult novels and juvenile books.

Every time I write a song I feel really lucky and kind of surprised. Not surprised that I wrote it, but just surprised that things exist that you don't know about.

All good ideas arrive by chance.

As I've often said, you can shop online and find whatever you're looking for, but bookstores are where you find what you weren't looking for.

The terrible thing about the Internet and Amazon is that they take the magic and happy chaos out of book shopping. The Internet might give you what you want, but it won't give you what you need.

I don't like to search too much. I find it is easier when romance finds you.

As consumers, we are faced with hundreds of choices - and when it comes to books, thousands of choices.

I love the Web, but the basis of my work is going through the physical books. When you go to the library, you see other books around on the shelves that you never knew existed. You can flip through a book and see the whole outline of it.

I read reviews and consider myself pretty 'plugged in' to the literary cosmos, yet one of the things I love best about book-touring is the opportunity to compare notes with favorite booksellers around the country. I always come home with books by authors I'd never heard of - or books I've read about but didn't realize I might love.

I have a tendency to be lucky and make the right choices based on limited information.

Ah yes, the paradox of publicity is that even as we do it, we know it's killing off the chance of another reader happening across our book in the ideal state of innocence.

I didn't decide to be a photographer; I just happened to fall into it.

You can find inspiration when you're not even looking for it.

Certain things you have to stumble on to. They can't be preprogrammed.

In using chance operations, the mind is enriched.

I've never had a game plan. It's just if something comes along and it feels right in the moment.