Book Length Quotes

#1. I haven't been the kind of writer about whom book-length academic studies have been written.

Manuel Puig

#2. Readers who claim a preference for short-form over long often tell me it's because they don't have time to commit to a book-length chunk of writing.

Lynn Coady

#3. When I am working on an epic-length book, the writing process is fairly long. It takes from four to five years to get through all the drafts. The book is done when I am exhausted.

Gunter Grass

#4. Reading is also traveling, with the eyes along the length of an idea, which can be folded up into the compressed space of a book and unfolded within your imagination and your understanding.

Rebecca Solnit

#5. It's my contention that each book creates its own structure and its own length. I've written three or four slim books. It may be that the next novel is a big one, but I don't know.

Don DeLillo

#6. A single bead of water rolled along the length of his spine and glided down the powerful lines of his body. Mariel moistened her lips and watched its seductive descent, overwhelmed with the temptation to trace its path with the tip of her tongue.

Madeline Martin

#7. Thorkell Mylrea had waited long for a dead man's shoes, but he was wearing them at length.

Hall Caine

#8. Never judge the length of a book by it's spine!

Stephanie Bates

#9. I'm remembering one book that I wrote, 'Fourth Grade Rats,' that took a month to write, but most of them, full-length novels, I would say about a year.

Jerry Spinelli

#10. Babbitt as a book was planless; its end arrived apparently because its author had come to the end of the writing-pad, or rather, one might suspect from its length, to the end of all writing-pads then on the market.

Rebecca West

#11. I think people seem to want to read pieces that are shorter but not as short as the pieces they can read in small bites on the Internet. It may be that the sort of long essays are hitting a sweet spot between the tiny morsels online and the full-length book.

Meghan Daum

#12. The computer is the way I'm making books, but I still think about the physical properties. I visualize the length of a book, the proportions of a book, in material terms.

Jonathan Lethem

#13. But most weeks I've gone through 12 books, maybe even 15 some weeks, depending on the length. So I go through my long form, and then my day begins. I usually try to do most of my writing earlier in the day because I sort of lump out later on.

Maria Popova

#14. I have devoted a whole book (Unweaving the Rainbow) to ultimate meaning, to the poetry of science, and to rebutting, specifically and at length, the charge of nihilistic negativity, so I shall restrain myself here.

Richard Dawkins

#15. For the length of time it takes to write a book, you need to believe that you're the only writer in existence; the only one who matters. You need to shut yourself away and allow the creativity to build up, not leak out through worry and comparisons and doubt.

Martin Cosgrove

#16. Most of the things that are supposed to be so objectionable in books are things that every teenager, in the United States, not only knows, but has talked about at length in school, or on the way home from school.

Bennett Cerf

#17. The difficulty with film is you always have to consign a story to being a certain length, whereas with a book you don't have budget constraints; you can cast it yourself.

Emilia Fox

#18. As a book author, it's your responsibility to cast a vision for your book about the length and appearance before you pitch the idea to a publisher.

W. Terry Whalin

#19. You're not a historian, but most historians will tell you that they make very discrete judgment as to what facts to omit in order to make their book into some shape, some length that can be managed.

Oliver Stone

#20. It is a book for manufacturing companies that are fighting desperately for survival and that will go to any length to improve their factories and overcome the obstacles to success. One could even call this book a 'bible' for corporate survival.

Hiroyuki Hirano

#21. How long it takes to write a book depends on its length.

Walter Jon Williams

#22. One of the best things Henry Miller ever said was that art goes all out. It's all out. It goes full length ... A big book is an all-out book in which you limit your life to things that pertain directly to the book.

Nelson Algren

#23. I might go on discussing this subject at great length, but after all is said, done, and written, my own book of experiences will best show what these obstacles are, and how I managed to overcome them to some extent.

Major Taylor

#24. The first book was my first attempt at writing full-length prose.

Neil Simon

#25. The first person you should think of pleasing, in writing a book, is yourself. If you can amuse yourself for the length of time it takes to write a book, the publisher and the readers can and will come later.

Patricia Highsmith

#26. Still, I believe the first draft of a book - even a long one - should take no more than three months, the length of a season.

Stephen King

#27. In terms of writing, I think what most fiction writers treasure more than anything is the feeling that they're living for the length of a book inside another person.

Lauren Groff

#28. Oman's book Wellington's Army is 400 pages in length but just a single page is devoted to the artillery with the opening, 'only a short note is required as to Wellington's use of artillery'. Historians ever since

Nick Lipscombe

#29. There are so many elements and nuances from the books that are very hard to tell in the length of a movie.

Jade Hassoune

#30. The earliest full-length account of a chariot race appears in Book xxiii of the Iliad.

Richard Arnold Epstein

#31. I like to get ten pages a day, which amounts to 2,000 words. That's 180,000 words over a three-month span, a goodish length for a book - something in which the reader can get happily lost, if the tale is done well and stays fresh.

Stephen King