Book Length Quotes

I like to get ten pages a day, which amounts to 2,000 words. That’s 180,000 words over a three-month span, a goodish length for a book — something in which the reader can get happily lost, if the tale is done well and stays fresh.

You can't get a cup of tea big enough or a book long enough to suit me.

I tend not to write books that are really, really long, and I'm also a pretty fast writer.

American Gods is about 200,000 words long, and I'm sure there are words that are simply in there 'cause I like them. I know I couldn't justify each and every one of them.

People who don't normally read make an exception for my books, possibly because they're short.

The broader the topic, the easier it is, not only to fill a book, but to set the bar pretty high for really great stuff.

The more powerful you become, the less likely it is that people will tell you the truth. It must be why the 'Harry Potter' books become so bloated as the series progresses; think of the beautiful, precise editing of books 1-3 drowned in a mire of sycophancy and yea-saying.

Longest book was '2666' by Roberto Bolano, and it was an irregular reading experience. I read the first four parts during a cross-country plane trip, reading at slightly slower-than-usual speed but surprised at how accessible the book was compared with 'The Savage Detectives.'

but for my own part, if a book is well written, I always find it too short.

I don't change the language for children books. I don't make the language simpler. I use words that they might have to look up in the dictionary. The books are shorter, but there's just not that much difference other than that to be honest. And the funny thing is, I have adult writer friends [to whom I would say], "Would you think of writing a children's book?" and they go, "No, God, I wouldn't know how." They're quite intimidated by the concept of it. And when I say to children's books writers, would they write an adult book, they say no because they think they're too good for it.

Babbitt as a book was planless; its end arrived apparently because its author had come to the end of the writing-pad, or rather, one might suspect from its length, to the end of all writing-pads then on the market.

Should novels generally be 600 pages? No, they should not. Half of writing, maybe 3/4 of writing, is editing. This seems to be a thing that has not gotten through to them. It's my impression that you could get rid of half of most of these books. These people are not good enough to be this long, but they're apparently also not good enough to be shorter.

But I too hate long books: the better, the worse. If they're bad they merely make me pant with the effort of holding them up for a few minutes. But if they're good, I turn into a social moron for days, refusing to go out of my room, scowling and growling at interruptions, ignoring weddings and funerals, and making enemies out of friends. I still bear the scars of Middlemarch.

I basically wrote five books with 'Night Soldiers,' called them novellas, and came in with a 600-page manuscript.

On the whole, I don't like reading long books. I'm not a fan of 'Ulysses.' And I haven't quite finished 'War and Peace.'

Sarah Palin's book is big, 400 pages. She wrote the book herself and agonized over every word, and so will you.

There's not too much difference between writing a picture book and writing a collection of a hundred poems or so, except that the bigger books take a lot longer to do.

It's almost like an optical illusion, 'The Hobbit.' You look at the book, and it is really thin, and you could make a relatively thin film as well. What I mean by that is that you could race through the story at the speed that Tolkien does.

One always tends to overpraise a long book, because one has got through it.

When I am working on an epic-length book, the writing process is fairly long. It takes from four to five years to get through all the drafts. The book is done when I am exhausted.

A novel is a book with a lot of pages.

The novels take longer to write than the picture book texts, and they do take a different sort of concentration. However, a very short, simple story that works well is just as exciting to me as any longer and more complex book.

If I wanted to be bored by 6,000 pages of unreadable dreck, I'd read War and Peace four times.

I often feel newspapers are just filling up space. Of course, I also know people who write really long books.

Everybody thinks that an important book has to be a big, long book.