John Boyne Quotes About Books

Quotes about: Books

• I can't bear to be on a train without a book", she announced. " It's a form of self-defence in a way" .

  John Boyne

  Book, Self, Way

• I started reading Dickens when I was about 12, and I particularly liked all of the orphan books. I always liked books about young people who are left on their own with the world, and the four children's books I've written feature that very thing: children that are abandoned by their families or running away from their families or ignored by their families and having to grow up quicker than they should, like David Copperfield - having to be the hero of their own story.

  John Boyne

  Running, Growing Up, Children

  "John Boyne hates celebrity children's books". Interview with Kelly Gallucci, www.usatoday.com. April 11, 2014.

• I am frustrated by celebrities who decide to write children's books because they think it's easy. That drives me crazy. It's frustrating because it's unfair to children. Because they'll get a lot of attention, they'll get a lot of marketing budget and so on just because they're a celebrity - the Madonnas, the Ricky Gervaises, the Russell Brands.

  John Boyne

  Children, Crazy, Book

• I like reading books about kids where there weren't really many adults, where they didn't need an adult to come and solve the problems for them. They could use their own ingenuity, use their own talents to solve whatever the issue was. And I like that still. I think that children want to read about heroic children. They don't want to read about children that have to be saved all the time.

  John Boyne

  Children, Book, Reading

• I hope for so much from every book I read. And time and again, I find myself disappointed. I look across my bookshelves and see hundreds of titles which in my memory seem merely mediocre or second-rate. Only occasionally does a novel appear for which I feel a lasting passion, a book that I think could in time become a classic.

  John Boyne

  Memories, Book, Passion

• I was a very quiet child, quite introverted, really. Independent, yes; I didn't need a lot of supervision. Less so than I did when I got older, maybe. But I was a bookish child, not surprisingly. I could sit quite happily in a corner for hours and entertain myself with books.

  John Boyne

  Children, Book, Independent

  "John Boyne hates celebrity children's books". Interview with Kelly Gallucci, www.usatoday.com. April 11, 2014.

• I was dropped by my publisher after my first two books. But I always believed in myself.

  John Boyne

  Book, Two, Firsts

• I like the idea of standalone novels. I always found with series of books, it's something that publishers love obviously because they can make a lot of money and they build an audience from book to book, but I don't like that as a writer. I prefer the idea of just telling a story, completing it within your book, and moving on and not forcing a child to read eight of them.

  John Boyne

  Children, Moving, Book

  "John Boyne hates celebrity children's books". Interview with Kelly Gallucci, www.usatoday.com. April 11, 2014.

• I think that books for young people should have serious and important themes, they shouldn't be trivial. So the books I write, they would be the kind of stories you would write in an adult novel only they just happen to feature a child at the center of them.

  John Boyne

  Children, Book, Writing

• With the adult ones, I feel I need to get as deep inside the psychology of a character as I can, and that needs to be first-person. In the children's books, I feel I need some distance. I don't want to be the nine-year-old at the center of the story. I need to have some type of narrative voice.

  John Boyne

  Children, Distance, Book

  "John Boyne hates celebrity children's books". Interview with Kelly Gallucci, www.usatoday.com. April 11, 2014.

• I don't change the language for children books. I don't make the language simpler. I use words that they might have to look up in the dictionary. The books are shorter, but there's just not that much difference other than that to be honest. And the funny thing is, I have adult writer friends [to whom I would say], "Would you think of writing a children's book?" and they go, "No, God, I wouldn't know how." They're quite intimidated by the concept of it. And when I say to children's books writers, would they write an adult book, they say no because they think they're too good for it.

  John Boyne

  Children, Book, Writing

• Children's book writers tend to feel quite superior, and adult writers tend to feel they wouldn't know how to write a children's book - which might surprise you because I think a lot of people think it's the other way around.

  John Boyne

  Children, Book, Writing

  "John Boyne hates celebrity children's books". Interview with Kelly Gallucci, www.usatoday.com. April 11, 2014.

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