Literary Connections Quotes

I don't read a lot of books that were published after 1755. One thing about having friends in New York who belong to the literary world, however, is that I have a steady stream of books coming to the house.

You can look at the New York Times Bestseller List and you can be pretty sure that the writers on that list don't know each other very well.

After all, it's the librarian's sworn purpose to bring books together with their one true reader.

In Japan, the writers have made up a literary community, a circle, a society. I think 90 percent of Japan's writers live in Tokyo. Naturally, they make a community. There are groups and customs, and so they are tied up in a way.

We learned in the university to consider Wordsworth and Keats as Romantics. They were only a generation apart, but Wordsworth didn't even read Keats's book when he gave him a copy.

If you're going to be related to someone it might as well be Dickens.

One of the pleasantest things about book writing is that sometimes it brings one in touch with old friends.

The first author I met socially was Joyce Cary.

I never actually sought out an agent or a publishing house. A friend of mine named David Simmer got wind of what I was doing, and he sent one of my books to a literary lawyer in Los Angeles. He loved it, and he sent it to other people, including an agent, and he picked me up, and that's how 'Bird Box' got to where it is now.

Reading was a way to make friends or enemies, a way to discover how all these different people exist in the world and to rub shoulders with them. The ability to feel as if you have met someone, as if that person exists in flesh and blood and that you relate to them somehow, makes you feel a lot less lonely. And it also makes you feel very brave.

We never tire of the friendships we form with books.

I believe in communication; books communicate ideas and make bridges between people.

At the same time, I think books create a sort of network in the reader's mind, with one book reinforcing another. Some books form relationships. Other books stand in opposition. No two writers or readers have the same pattern of interaction.

I've had very close relationships with some twentieth-century writers.

Being a writer can be isolating. It's good to be among readers and booksellers.

I wrote a query letter to an editor - a friend of a friend. The editor called me an idiot, told me never to contact an editor directly, and then recommended three literary agents he had worked with before. Laurie Fox was one of them, and I've never looked back.

I am well aware that the writers of New York, London, and Toronto are more readily noticed, though the shadowy and potent Ozarks Literary Cabal does what it can for me, then nightly joins me for dinner and calls me 'honey.'

But that incessant drive to be out there in the literary universe that was important to me when I was in my twenties, like going to a Paris Review party or whatever, that seems totally irrelevant now.

You put books out into the world, and people form their own visuals and images and attachments to characters; those characters become part of them, and they have their feelings about them.

As a former English major, I have always been fascinated by the connections between literature and history.

It's very hard for me to write back to some of the fan mail, so one of the things I wanted to do was reach out through a book.

Not having any real direction, one writer would lead me to another.

I think of my own work as part of a decades-long conversation about books and reading with people I will mainly never meet.

Books are the bees which carry the quickening pollen from one to another mind.

Despite what you hear about the publishing industry being a fixed game that you can only get in if you know somebody, I'm here in person to tell you it ain't so. If your stuff is really any good, sooner or later some editor will take a chance on you.