Top 65 Quotes & Sayings by John Boyne

War today is such a more visible thing. We see it on television, on CNN. In 1914, war was a concept.

I wrote my first book at 20, but my whole focus from about the age of 12 was to be a writer.

Throughout my teenage years, I read 'A Christmas Carol' by Charles Dickens every December. It was a story that never failed to excite me, for as well as being a Dickens enthusiast, I have always loved ghost stories.

I don't buy into the idea that an Irish writer should write about Ireland, or a gay writer should write about being gay.

I move between the two: I write an adult novel, and then I write a children's book. I quite enjoy that. It's a nice change of pace each time.

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.

It's not easy making a living as a writer, and for many years I worked at a Waterstones in Dublin. It was a good environment for an aspiring writer, with lots of events and authors appearing.

I suppose books are my real passion in life.

What makes a classic is difficult to define. It's entirely subjective, of course. And the term is employed far too promiscuously.

People try to glorify war, particularly those who aren't actually fighting in them. People tend to make heroes of those who are fighting in them.

Children's authors don't talk down or patronise their younger readers.

It's a wonderful thing to write for children.

I can remember being eight, and I like writing about that age of innocence when children still have a sense of wonder.

Unless you're very boring, I think most people who've lived long enough have something in their past which will never go away.

I am opposed to war, to killing people, to any kind of hatred and violence.

Today people can see and protest all the different interests that want war to happen, the people it financially benefits. The First World War wasn't fought for that reason. The Second World War wasn't fought for that reason. Your entire country and way of life could be overtaken.

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.

Bruno: "Why do you wear pajamas all day?" Shmuel: "The soldiers. They took all our clothes away." Bruno: "My dad's a soldier, but not the sort that takes people's clothes away."

The thing about exploring is that you have to know whether the thing you've found is worth finding. Some things are just sitting there, minding their own business, waiting to be discovered. Like America. And other things are probably better off left alone. Like a dead mouse at the back of the cupboard.

There will be outrage and disgust and people will turn on me at the last, they will hate me, my reputation will forever be destroyed, my punishment earned, self-inflicted like this gunshot wound, and the world will finally know that I was the greatest feather man of them all.

He looked the boy up and down as if he had never seen a child before and wasn't quite sure what he was supposed to do with one: eat it, ignore it or kick it down the stairs.

But still there are moments when a brother and sister can lay down their instruments of torture for a moment and speak as civilized human beings and Bruno decided to make this one of those moments.

It is possible, you know, to drift off to an unknown world and find happiness there. Maybe even more happiness than you've ever known before.

Do you see the irony at all, Tristan?’ I stare at him and shake my head. He seems determined not to speak again until I do. ‘What irony?’ I ask eventually, the words tumbling out in a hurried heap. ‘That I am to be shot as a coward while you get to live as one.

... Nine-year-old boys usually turn ten at some point. It's the nineteen-year-olds who have difficulty turning twenty.

I think i'm just breathing, that's all. And there's a difference between breathing and being alive.

We all are [normal]. Their idea of normal just happens to be different to some other people's idea of normal. But this is the world we live in. Some people simply cannot accept something that is outside of their experience.

In his heart, he knew that there was no reason to be impolite to someone, even if they did work for you. There was such a thing as manners after all.

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.

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.

Just because a man glances up at the sky at night does not make him an astronomer, you know.

He looked down and did something quite out of character for him: he took hold of Shmuel's tiny hand in his and squeezed it tightly. "You're my best friend, Shmuel," he said. "My best friend for life.

Unless you're very boring, I think most people who've lived long enough have something in their past which will never go away. As a writer, my interest has become in writing about much more emotional, personal topics. I'm trying to reach into subjects I have never written about before.

There's things that happen in a person's life that are so scorched in the memory and burned into the heart that there's no forgetting them.

Don't make it worse by thinking it's more painful than it actually is.

Bruno opened his eyes in wonder at the things he saw. In his imagination he had tough that all the huts were full of happy families, some of whom sat outside on rocking chairs in the evening and told stories about how things were so much better when they were children and they'd had nowadays. He thought that all the boys and girls who lived there would be in different groups, playing tennis or football, skipping and drawing out squares for hopscotch on the ground. As it turned out, all the things he thought might be there-wern't.'' -The boy in the striped Pajamas

. . .only the victims and survivors can truly comprehend the awfulness of that time and place; the rest of us live on the other side of the fence, staring through from our own comfortable place, trying in our own clumsy ways to make sense of it all.

There is cruelty in the world Eliza, you can see that, can't you? It surrounds us. It breathes on us. We spend our life trying to escape it.

Well you've been brought here against your will, just like I have. If you ask me, we're all in the same boat. And it's leaking.

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

(J)ust because your version of normal isn't the same as someone else's version doesn't mean that there's anything wrong with you.

He suddenly became convinced that if he didn’t do something sensible, something to put his mind to some use, then before he knew it he would be wondering round the streets having fights with himself and inviting domestic animals to social occasions too.

And I have tried to forget him, I have tried to convince myself that it was just one of those things, but it’s difficult to do that when my body is standing here, eight feet deep in the earth of northern France, while my heart remains by a stream in a clearing in England where I left it weeks ago.

War today is such a more visible thing. We see it on television, on CNN. In 1914, war was a concept. There was a naivety and stupidity that war would be a great lark. It's not that different from Gone With The Wind, where all the young men can't wait to go off to fight and then two hours later in the movie, we see how the reality of that has come home to them.

Their lost voices must continue to be heard.

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.

The dot that became a speck that became a blob that became a figure that became a boy

Very slowly he turned his head back to look at Shmuel, who wasn't crying anymore, merely staring at the floor and looking as if he was trying to convince his soul not to live inside his tiny body anymore, but to slip away and sail to the door and rise up into the sky, gliding through the clouds until it was very far away.'' -The Boy in the Striped Pajamas

Sitting around miserable all day won't make you any happier.

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.

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.

The first thing he noticed was how quiet it was. This was nothing like the kind of quiet he heard when he woke up in the middle of the night after a bad dream. When that happened, there were always strange, unidentifiable sounds seeping into his room from the tiny gaps where the windowpanes weren't sealed together correctly. At those moments he could always tell there was life outside, even if all that life was fast asleep. It was a silence that wasn't silence at all.

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.

The people I see from my window. In the huts, in the distance. They're all dressed the same.' 'Ah, those people,' said Father, nodding his head and smiling slightly. 'Those people...well, they're not people at all, Bruno.' Bruno frowned. 'They're not?' he asked, unsure what Father meant by that.

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.

I enjoy the research element. There are so many stories from the past that interest me, that I want to learn more about, just as an interested person. And if I'm going to learn, if I'm going to research, it's probably going to lead me to writing a novel.

What exactly was the difference? he wondered to himself. And who decided which people wore the striped pajamas and which people wore the uniforms?

...Despite the mayhem that followed, Bruno found that he was still holding Shmuel's hand in his own and nothing in the world would have persuaded him to let go.

Bruno: We're not supposed to be friends, you and me. We're meant to be enemies. Did you know that?

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.