Literary Gathering Quotes

I'd have opened a bloody library if I'd wanted to be quiet.

One of my latest sensations was going to Lady Airlie's to hear Browning read his own poems - with the comport of finding that, at least, if you don't understand them, he himself apparently understands them even less. He read them as if he hated them and would like to bite them to pieces.

The most important thing about writing a book is having book parties.

Literary Party: A traffic jam of the lost waiting for the ferry across the Styx.

The first author I met socially was Joyce Cary.

Wearing a giant, over-sized scarf will make you look deeply intelligent in almost any situation, but especially a book club.

The only way for writers to meet is to share a quick peek over a common lamp-post.

My first signing was at my hometown independent bookstore and everyone in the world came. It was so nice. My family was there, my parents, everybody I worked with, all my friends. So I had this great first reading with a like hundred people there.

Bookstores, like libraries, are the physical manifestation of the wide world's longest, most thrilling conversation.

The complexion of a novelist is seldom rosy (Paul Bailey once announced to a heavy-hearted audience of novelists at PEN that we have always been an ugly tribe). We are engaged in indoor activity, haemorrhoidal, prone to chillblains, poor of circulation.

I love meeting my readers - so the more I can talk to at one event the better!

Ah, how good it is to be among people who are reading!

literature is the last banquet between minds.

A panel at a beautiful annual literary festival in Brazil, held in the almost Utopian coastal town of Parati, found me matched with Fernando Gabeira. This comparison reduced my own limited charisma value to something like zero: Gabeira has excelled at every cultural activity in Brazil.

Get your friends together, go to your local bookstore and have a book-buying party.