Literary Fulfillment Quotes

People talk about the pain of writing, but very few people talk about the pleasure and satisfaction.

The nicest notes I've received from readers are those that tell me I've gotten them back into reading for entertainment. For me, there is no greater compliment.

Getting a book published made me feel a little bit sad. I felt driven by the need to write a book, rather than the need to write. I needed to figure out what was important to me as a writer.

Most of the pleasure of making a book would go if it held nothing to be shared by other people. I would write for a few dozen people, and sometimes it seems that I do so, but I would not write for no-one.

If I couldn't use food or love to define contentment, I would use reading.

Objectifying your own novel while writing it never really helps. Instead, I guess while you're writing you need to think: This is the novel I want to write. And when you're done you need to think: This is what the novel I wanted to write feels like and reads like and looks like. Other people might call it sweeping or small, but it's the book you chose.

'Slow Heat in Heaven' was my 'breakout' or 'crossover' book, and I loved the freedom I felt writing it.

I've often envied those writers in the Western world who can peacefully practice their craft and earn a living thereby. I cannot say that I would not have preferred that to the dangerous paths through which my art is taking me. However, we must go where the spirit moves us, and I can only hope that my travails will have brought pleasure in the future to many more people than my books will probably have done.

When I was 20 I was immensely proud of the rows of grey-spined Penguin Modern Classics in my bookcase.

The pleasure a reader gets is often equal to the pleasure a writer is given.

Every time I sit down to reread 'War and Peace' - I've read it three times - I feel as though I've lived another life.

I never thought I would just be doing Arkady books.

I still think reading something like 'Ulysses' takes a tremendous investment of time, but it repays all of it with so much interest.

The No. 1 thing is to write the book that you love and then hope that it finds an audience with the same taste as you. I think I've done that, and that's lucky.

One of the great rewards of a writer's life is that it lets you read all the books you want to without feeling guilty.

For me,the greater part of writing is daydreaming, dreaming the dream of my story until it hatches out-the writing down of it I always find hard.But I love finishing it,then holding the book in my hand and sharing my dream with my readers.

Books cannot always please, however good; Minds are not ever craving for their food.

I'm nothing if not a literary hedonist.

I was just delighted to be a legitimate, for-real published author.

I therefore set to work, and after two and a half years of not inconsiderable labour I now have the privilege and the satisfaction of accompanying the early volumes of the series with this preface.

What's important to me is that all of my books are in print - and, in a way, that becomes the challenge, not winning this prize or getting that review. It's that the work is there, and you can walk into many bookshops throughout the world and buy it.

Every time you finish a book, you have a terrible feeling that there's just never going to be another one. But fortunately, so far, the next one has always shown up.