Gabrielle Zevin
I'm in the middle of a 25-city book tour, and I like watching what people buy in bookstores. I see people buy books that I strongly suspect they will never read, and as an author, I must tell you, I don't mind this one bit. We buy books aspirationally.
People choose to read, and it takes effort. It's not one of those hobbies that asks nothing of the person who is doing it. It's more than a hobby.
I like to believe, as a writer, that anybody who isn't a reader yet has just not found the right book.
Before I liked to write, I liked to type. I remember visiting my grandmother Adele in Ponce Inlet, Florida, when I was three years old, and she had an IBM electric typewriter.
When I was around eight, I learned how to touch-type at school, and I received a computer as a present. I started writing plays, and for many years I thought I would be a playwright.
I don't believe in writer's block.
I wish that the adults who are 'in power' cared more about what their children read. Books are incredibly powerful when we are young - the books I read as a child have stayed with me my entire life - and yet, the people who write about books, for the most part, completely ignore children's literature.
I think you can do a lot, like describing people with their physical characteristics, things like that, but to me, I've always found it to be a much more informative question to ask somebody what they read.
Sometimes, readers, when they're young, are given, say, a book like 'Moby Dick' to read. And it is an interesting, complicated book, but it's not something that somebody who has never read a book before should be given as an example of why you'll really love to read, necessarily.
I myself am mixed race - my mother is Korean, and my father is an American Jew - so I've always felt other.
I knew I wanted to do something creative, and you don't necessarily go to Harvard to do that. It's not the best choice for creative writing.
Writing blurbs for books means you have to read the book, and it cuts into the business of bookselling. So every time I get a blurb from a bookseller, I try to write a thank you note.
In a way, publishing in 2005 was similar to publishing in 1950. Nobody kept blogs; that was still optional. I didn't even have a website then.
I'm very privy to the way bookstores work, and I think a lot about the ecosystem that my books have been published in. I think it's great to be aware of how publishing works.
I'm like a unicorn; I'm a midlist writer who hasn't done anything else but write. But because I wasn't amazingly famous, I didn't become Stephanie Meyer, or even a huge literary name like a Jonathan Franzen or a Joshua Ferris.
I remember visiting my grandmother Adele in Ponce Inlet, Florida, when I was three years old, and she had an IBM electric typewriter. I thought that this electric typewriter was about the most fascinating toy in the world - I liked the little bell and the sounds and the feel of the keys and especially the erase key.
I hadn't ever felt any particular calling to be a novelist, and I clearly remember telling a friend of mine about six months before I started work on 'Elsewhere' that I would never write a novel.
When I first started writing, I used to listen to music all the time because it would make time pass more quickly. And then I started to wonder if the music wasn't affecting my writing in ways that I didn't necessarily intend.
On some level, I think we want our reading self to represent our best self.
My grandparents used to bring me books every time they saw me.
For the record, I have long suspected that my favorite book is actually 'Charlotte's Web.'
You know everything you need to know about a person from the answer to the question, What is your favorite book?Collection: Book
Death is a state of mind---many people on Earth spend their entire lives dead.Collection: People
I can promise you books and conversation and all my heart.Collection: Book
Ask two people to tell you anything, you’ll get two versions. Even easy things like directions, let alone important or semi-controversial topics like why a fight started or what a person was generally like. If you don’t know something for yourself, you just can’t be sure.Collection: Fighting
But I believe good things happen everyday. I believe good things happen even when bad things happen. And I believe on a happy day like today, we can still feel a little sad. And that's life, isn't it?Collection: Life
We aren't the things we collect, acquire, read. We are, for as long as we are here, only love. The things we loved. The people we loved. And these, I think these really do live on.Collection: Thinking
It was strange, really. A couple months ago, I had thought I couldn’t live without him. Apparently I could.Collection: Moving On
The things we respond to at twenty are not necessarily the same things we will respond to at forty and vice versa. This is true in books and also in lifeCollection: Book
Someday, we’ll run into each other again, I know it. Maybe I’ll be older and smarter and just plain better. If that happens, that’s when I’ll deserve you. But now, at this moment, you can’t hook your boat to mine, because I’m liable to sink us both.Collection: Love
They should tell you when you’re born: have a suitcase heart, be ready to travel.Collection: Heartbreak
People, you'll find, aren't usually all good or bad. Sometimes they're just a little bit good and a whole lot bad. And sometimes they're mostly good with a dash of bad. And most of us, well, we fall in the middle somewhere.Collection: Fall
No one actually needs another person or another person's love to survive. Love is when we have irrationally convinced ourselves that we do.Collection: Love Is
It’s difficult to ever go back to the same places or people. You turn away, even for a moment, and when you turn back around, everything’s changed.Collection: Loss
The only love she inspires is the canine kind.Collection: Inspire
Daddy always said you only explained things to the people that actually mattered.Collection: Daddy
Should have. Would have. Could have. Didn't.Collection: Should Have
On, there are so many lives. How we wish we could live them concurrently instead of one by one by one. We could select the best pieces of each, stringing them together like a strand of pearls. But that's not how it works. A human life is a beautiful mess.Collection: Beautiful
And when she dreams, she dreams of a girl who was lost at sea but one day found the shore.Collection: Girl
We are not quite novels. We are not quite short stories. In the end, we are collected worksCollection: Stories
Diving is a leap of faith plus gravity.Collection: Leap Of Faith
It was odd to have something so personal out there in that way, but the good thing about art is that no one necessarily knows what you mean by it anyway.Collection: Art
...lies can sound awfully pretty when a girl is in love with the person telling them.Collection: Girl
I have so much paperwork. I'm afraid my paperwork has paperwork.Collection: Paperwork
My brain said no. But my heart!Collection: Heart
What are you reading?" Owen asks. "Charlotte's Web," Liz says. "It's really sad. One of the main characters just died." "You ought to read the book from end to beginning," Owen jokes. "That way, no one dies, and it's always a happy ending.Collection: Reading
It's sad when you think about it, but also kind of beautiful.Collection: Beautiful
There's a strange sort of quiet when you're dying. It's as if you're in a glass room, and the walls keep getting thicker and thicker.Collection: Wall
"I accept your condemnation," I said.Collection: Accepting