Book Project Quotes

I've been wanting to do a book about baseball for the longest time, and nobody will let me do it. It's the one thing from America I really miss.

We certainly have a lot of ideas, and we both love what Tony [Fucile] did with the book [Bink & Gollie]. If we could all pull it off, I think all three of us would like to do another.

Writing a book is not a small undertaking, but God placed it on my heart to trust Him with such a project.

The basic challenge of any book is you know you're going to be working on it for three or four years or more. So you want to have a subject that will keep you engaged.

I write different kinds of sentences, depending on what the book is, and what the project is. I see my work evolving. I'm writing long sentences now, something I didn't use to do. I had some kind of breakthrough, five or six years ago, in Invisible, and in Sunset Park after that. I discovered a new way to write sentences. And I find it exhilarating.

I ended up [doing video] meeting Gillian [Grassie] at the same time that we were getting together a book. We ended up working on it, and she recognized that I had a flair for certain things, and we've worked through it together so that the writing could be really good. It was the perfect partnership, just finding my literary voice and figuring out how comedy translates to the written word.

I think I write and publish as often as I do because I can't bear being without a book to work on... I don't feel I have this to say or that to say or this story to tell, but I know I want to be occupied with the writing process while I'm living.

I had been working on a second book with [David] Petraeus called Relentless. Obviously that book and the income that it would have generated went away.

Writing is exhilarating, but reading reviews is not. I've been really devastated by 'good' reviews because they misunderstand the project of the book. It can be strangely galvanising to get a 'bad' one.

I'd really like to write a book about Timothy McVeigh, but it would only work if he cooperated.

Anybody who tells you they're not scared when starting a new book project is a very good liar.

My personal relationship with Ali began in 1988, when we met in New York to explore the possibility of my writing the book that ultimately became 'Muhammad Ali: His Life and Times.'

The Rift, which was well over a thousand pages of manuscript, took two years.

I put off writing the first Left Behind book for a year because I got invited to assist Billy Graham in his memoirs, and had we known what we were putting off for a year, we might not have put it off.

It's a terrific... you can't put it down. So I phoned him back and I said I'd love to do it. I went over to Paris for a meeting, and we just talked very generally about the approach.

I think I write or publish as much as I do because I can bear being without a book to work on.