Matt de la Pena Quotes

Writers are really people who write books not because they are poor, but because they are dissatisfied with the books which they could buy but do not like.

When I do get to chow down on a book, I try to read ones that are nothing like what I'm writing. So, as I'm currently working on a space opera (of sorts) I'm mostly indulging in urban fantasy.

When I get to a point in my book writing when I don't know what I'm going to do next, I'll come back look at underlined passages and see if the images I wrote still have a certain amount of resonance for me.

I don't make that decision [what next book will be] until I've read enough to know that I've got something different to say and I know how to say it.

I think having a good agent is key. I've been with mine for ten years now, and she's very honest with me. There are a lot of times I've sent her books that were not so good because I was tired of writing, or panicked about money, and she's told me flat out, "You don't want this to be your next book. Trust me."

I don't have a publisher yet, so I'm not in the process of that next stage and I don't know what that's going to look like. So I feel like I finished stage one [with my book].

When I write a novel, I have what I think of as an icon that helps get me into the world of the book.

Book publishing was never a heaven "run by editors", and it is by no means today a hell "run by accountants." If our "sole interest" was "instant profit," not only would we never do any number of the things we actually do every day, we probably wouldn't be in book publishing at all.

I think the path to becoming a writer has become more through the novel. It's easier to get a novel published than a book of stories, obviously, especially through big publishers.

I decided that I would write one story about each thing that I knew about.

There is only one way to read, which is to browse in libraries and bookshops, picking up books that attract you, reading only those, dropping them when they bore you, skipping the parts that drag...

As a digital creator, there's been so much pressure to write a book because so many of my peers have done it. I've been very adamant about saying, "No! I don't want to release a book just for the sake of writing a book. I'm going to write a book when I feel like I have something to say in a book."

It is astonishing how many books I find there is no need for me to read at all.

Much depends upon when and where you read a book. In the five or six impatient minutes before the dinner is quite ready, who would think of taking up the Faerie Queen for a stopgap, or a volume of Bishop Andrews's Sermons?

It really gets me when the critics say I haven't done enough for the economy. I mean, look what I've done for the book publishing industry. You've heard some of the titles. 'Big Lies,' 'The Lies of George W. Bush,' 'The Lies and the Lying Liars Who Tell Them.' I'd like to tell you I've read each of these books, but that'd be a lie.

Books may look like nothing more than words on a page, but they are actually an infinitely complex imaginotransference technology that translates odd, inky squiggles into pictures inside your head.

After you publish a book, you become a writer and you're supposed to take it very seriously. You're supposed to show up at your desk - although frankly, I don't have a desk, I write in bed - you're supposed to show up at your bed and produce work. I think it's a little bit like work. I like to have fun with it, do things like make silly book trailers. I don't want to take this too seriously.

I read books I hate all the time, and I don't mention them or talk about them.

Books seek us out. They slip themselves into our hands just at the time we are ready for a new self-concept.

You don't look up truthiness in a book, you look it up in your gut.

It is a pity, in my opinion, that no prize exists for the writer who best refrains from adding to the world's bad books.

The one thing which seems to me quite impossible is to take into consideration the kind of book one is expected to write; surely one can only write the book that is there to be written.

the pleasure of possession, whether we possess trinkets, or offspring - or possibly books, or prints, or chessmen, or postage stamps - lies in showing these things to friends who are experiencing no immediate urge to look at them.

She told me later that she had made a kind of note of me in her mind, as, scanning the shelf for a particular book, one will sometimes have one's attention caught by another, take it down, glance at the title page and saying "I must read that, too, when I've the time," replace it and continue the search.

As Jules Renard said, no matter how much care an author takes to write as few books as possible, there will be people who haven't heard of some of them.