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No one really knows the value of book tours. Whether or not they're good ideas, or if they improve book sales. I happen to think the author is the last person you'd want to talk to about a book. They hate it by that point; they've already moved on to a new lover. Besides, the author never knows what the book is about anyway.

I have always thought, the secret purpose of the book tour is to make the writer hate the book he's written. And, as a result, drive him to write another book.

Book tours are excellent things, and one is lucky to get to go on one, but they have a way of leeching away one's will to live.

I feel sometimes like a book tour is a slow series of humiliations and that if you're strong you'll come out of it OK.

Usually by the time I finish a book tour I've just about had it with the book.

Travel books are, by and large, boring. They lodge uncomfortably between fact, fiction and autobiography.

I've never been on a paperback tour before, you know, because usually you go on tour when a hardcover comes out.

The book tour is a strange institution. You are wheeled about to explain your book and even to justify it.

You have to be a lover of books without expecting more of them than they give - a little pleasure, a little insight, a moment of escape, a deepening of your own humanity. Not much else.

I've planned book tours for myself, whether or not anybody wants to hear what I have to say. I've weighed in on things like what the cover looks like, what the copy looks like, how it's going to be promoted - just every aspect of it.