Gabrielle Zevin Quotations

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.

My grandparents used to bring me books every time they saw me.

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 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.

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.

For the record, I have long suspected that my favorite book is actually 'Charlotte's Web.'

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'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.

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.

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.