I said in my acceptance speech that I hope that readers remember this not as the year I won the Booker, but the year that there were six extraordinary books on the shortlist.
I grew up in a house full of books.
I grew up as a fan of comic books, and I've been reading them for so long that I've never felt an affinity toward just one.
Visit any bookshop in Europe, and the shelves are filled with English novels and non-fiction books in translation - while British bookshops stock mainly English and American works.
How much energy is wasted in Italy in trying to write the novel that obeys all the rules. The energy might have been useful to provide us with more modest, more genuine things, that had less pretensions: short stories, memoirs, notes, testimonials, or at any rate, books that are open, without a preconceived plan.
In the odd moment when I am not thinking about horses, I write books.
I do believe there will always be a place for beautiful cookbooks that are real books.
When you need a good laugh, do you reach for a book? I don't. I expect books to move me deeply and submerge me in another reality. So when a novel makes me roar with laughter, it's always a delightful surprise.
I don't think we should see the world of books as fundamentally separate from the world of the Internet. Yes, the Internet contains a lot of videos of squirrels riding skateboards, but it can also be a place that facilitates big conversations about books.
I feel less alone when I read the books of Ratzinger.
Songs won't save the planet, but neither will books or speeches.
I started writing while I was a little boy. Maybe it's because I was reading a lot of books I admired, and thought that I would like to write something like that someday. Also, my love for good writing pushed me.
I try to make my books reflect humanity as I see it.
To be an artist, you don't have to compose music or paint or be in the movies or write books. It's just a way of living. It has to do with paying attention, remembering, filtering what you see and answering back, participating in life.
My favorite books, art pieces, films, and music, always have something jarring about them.
Books are to be distinguished by the grandeur of their topics even more than by the manner in which they are treated.
I read a book a day when I was a kid. My family was not literary; we did not have any books in the house.
I always try to avoid looking at the section where my books would be shelved, but I do know that my most reliable neighbor to the right is Kate Chopin's 'The Awakening', which is dispiriting. That's a book I don't want to re-read.
If I had millions and millions and millions of dollars, I'd leave a large portion to the 42nd Street library. That's why - that was my hangout, the reading rooms, the North and South reading rooms. I'd go there, and my God, I couldn't believe I had access to all of these books. That was my university.
I think the thinking is, in the comic books, I should pack as much onto a page as possible, because, you know, it's kind of the cheaper format, and you want to give readers as much as you can for their dollar.
I want to read a lot of comic books. I want to watch movies. I want to rest.
Study nature, not books.
I've known since I was 12 that I wanted to write. My father was a teacher, and there were so many books around, it seemed natural to pick them up.
I personally, as a teenager, didn't like books I felt were trying to preach to me... I did not believe in happy endings. I wanted to read books which reflected life as I thought I knew it.
When you are writing, of course, you have to do all that writing and correcting for yourself. When I was a librarian it was expected that I would know about a wide range of books.
'Outlander' is based on a group of books; there's a slight fantasy element to it, but ours is authentic - we try to stick to historical accuracy as possible. Ours is about a small group of people and a core relationship rather than big armies.
While Fledging is a different type of book, The Parable series serve as cautionary tales. I wrote the Parable books because of the direction of the country. You can call it save the world fiction, but it clearly doesn't save anything.
If writers learn more from their books than do readers, perhaps I may have begun to learn.
Science is a victim of its own reductive metaphors: 'Big Bang,' 'selfish gene' and so on. Richard Dawkins' selfish gene fitted with the Thatcherite politics of the time. It should actually be the 'altruistic gene,' but he'd never have sold as many books with a title like that.
One of the most memorable things I hear is when someone tells me that my books got a reluctant reader to read.
I've heard people have written books of me. People don't even know me, but they've written a book on me. You ever heard of hearing it from the horse's mouth? I'm the horse.
Today the U.S. is farther from being nourished by poetry than it was a hundred years ago, when books of poems were best-sellers.
I don't care how I got here. In the books, when you look at it 10 or 20 years from now, it's not going say how he got here, it's going to say he's here and he represented the team.
My mom says: 'Why aren't you a doctor?' and I'm like, 'I am a doctor!' and she's all, 'No, I mean a real doctor.' She reads my books, but she says they give her a headache.
I write from my imagination, not from what I've read in books or seen on TV or to make money. I wrote from an idea I was passionate about.
As a child, I loved story books and wanted to be in them so desperately and live the stories.
