Quotes of All Topics . Occasions . Authors
When you realize that your history books and your science books and your literature books are not the result of experts sitting down and making it a wise decision, but of political pressure groups coming to the state textbook hearings, this is wrong.
You cannot pretend to read a book. Your eyes will give you away. So will your breathing. A person entranced by a book simply forgets to breathe. The house can catch alight and a reader deep in a book will not look up until the wallpaper is in flames.
I have no respect for the right-to-life position, though I have every respect for an individual who says, "I could never have that procedure, I could never see a film or read a book about that procedure." It doesn't bother me if people feel that way.
For the first time i began to think, consciously and deliberately of religion and other worlds. The Hindu religion especially went up in my estimation; not the ritual or ceremonial part, but it's great books, the "Upnishads," and the "Bhagavad Gita."
I had always turned to books, to knowledge, to help me get through everything in my life—and, sometimes, to escape it. But grief was a journey through a forest of razor blades. I walked through every painful inch of it—no shortcuts and no anesthesia.
Dig a trench through a landfill and you will see layers of phone books like geographical strata or layers of cake.... During a recent landfill dig in Phoenix, I found newspapers dating from 1952 that looked so fresh you might read one over breakfast.
The fact that people go to Portland to visit a tiny feminist bookstore-no matter what the impetus is for them getting there-the fact that they go in there and look around and shop for books or stationery or whatever, is a major source of pride for me.
Proverbs, like the sacred books of each nation, are the sanctuary of the intuitions. That which the droning world, chained to appearances, will not allow the realist to say in his own words, it will suffer him to say in proverbs without contradiction.
From my earliest memories I was fascinated by animals. I would explore my backyard for insects and gaze at anthills until my elbows became sore. When I was 8, my mother bought me a book of North American birds and I've been keen on birdwatching since.
I had been plunged into a different world. I found myself spending half my time answering weird questions on book tours in the Midwest. People would stand up and explain to me the situation in their office and ask me whether they should resign or not.
Unusual precocity in children, is usually the result of an unhealthy state of the brain; and, in such cases, medical men would now direct, that the wonderful child should be deprived of all books and study, and turned to play or work in the fresh air.
If I pick up a book with vampires on the cover, I want there to be vampires. If I pick up a book with spaceships on the cover, I want spaceships. If I see one with dragons, I want there to be dragons inside the book. Proper labeling. Ethical labeling.
How about your favorite book?" "This Side of Paradise by From. Scott Fitzgerald." "Why?" "Because it was the last one I read." This made them laugh because they knew I meant it honest, not show-off. Then they told me their favorites, and we sat quiet.
It's because of libraries that books like mine get recommended to book clubs and avid readers, who in turn pass them onto others looking to be whisked away from the world for a little while...and perhaps to learn a bit about themselves in the process.
Books are pleasant, but if by being over-studious we impair our health and spoil our good humour, two of the best things we have, let us give it over. I, for my part, am one of those who think no fruit derived from them can recompense so great a loss.
the shop owner did not try to push the book on any of her customers. She knew that in the wrong hands such a book could easily be dismissed, or, worse, go unread. Instead she let it sit where it was in the hope that the right reader might discover it.
More and more books are published every year. If people were not reading them, they wouldn't be published. We are in a different moment. We are now reading electronic books or whatever else, but people are still reading, and people still need stories.
Every age has its own outlook. It is specially good at seeing certain truths and specially liable to make certain mistakes. We all, therefore, need the books that will correct the characteristic mistake of our own period. And that means the old books.
'The Things They Carried' is labeled right inside the book as a work of fiction, but I did set out when I wrote the book to make it feel real... I use my own name, and I dedicated the book to characters in the book to give it the form of a war memoir.
I make up the characters in my books, but of course my consciousness is filled with every child I've ever known, including my two grandchildren, my own kids (I had four) and especially myself as a child, because that person still lives inside me, too.
I am a product [...of] endless books. My father bought all the books he read and never got rid of any of them.... I had always the same certainty of finding a book that was new to me as a man who walks into a field has of finding a new blade of grass.
I do so much revising as I go along; I wonder how I could write books if I hadn't grown up in the computer age. I think I'd be a very different writer. I find myself cutting and pasting, changing things around and deleting whole paragraphs constantly.
I’ve been looking at oil paintings from oriental artists lately, and the one artist who’s inspired me right now is a man named Hokusai and I’ve had his book by my bed looking at how he interprets landscapes – mountains and water and flowers and birds.
Art is a gift: you create and then you give away. How readers receive that gift is their business. If they hate it, that’s their response to it. Others respond by liking it. Either way, that is their interaction with the book, which is no longer mine.
When I start on a book, I have been thinking about it and making occasional notes for some time... So I have lots of theme, locale, subjects and technical ideas... I don't worry about long periods of not doing anything. I know my subconscious is busy.
In all their jollity in this world, the wicked are but as a book fairly bound, which when it is opened is full of nothing but tragedies. So when the book of their consciences shall be once opened, there is nothing to be read but lamentations and woes.
A library is that venerable place where men preserve the history of their experience, their tentative experiments, their discoveries, and their plans... in books may be found the recipes for daily living - the prescriptions for the mind and the heart.
The DC Universe has the best villains in fiction, right? I don't think there's any group of villains collectively or anywhere else that come close to DC's. Joker, Cat Woman, Lex Luthor, are all staples. A lot of the comic book icons are fiction icons.
I got the idea that to write books would be the best way to spend a life. I never thought of anything else that seemed like half as much fun, although in my next life I would like to be an architect, too, so I can have an easier time restoring houses.
This [Thelonious Monk: The Life And Times Of An American Original] is another one of those books with the perfect blend of anecdote and analysis. The analysis is built into the anecdote. It has that right feel about it. It's not too scholarly, either.
And then he left, and came back, and our lives fell apart, like a well-loved book that you’d read and read again, until one night you picked it up to read yourself to sleep and the binding collapsed, sending dozens of pages spiraling toward the floor.
...Albert-next-door doesn't care for reading, and he has not read nearly so many books as we have, so he is very foolish and ignorant, but it cannot be helped... Besides, it is wrong to be angry with people for not being so clever as you are yourself.
My values are not based on violence. My values are based on courage, which you see time and time again in my books. A warrior isn't somebody like Bruce Willis or Arnold Schwarzenegger. A warrior can be any age. A warrior is a person people look up to.
I should be sorry to think it was the publishers themselves they got up this entire little flutter to enable them to unload a book that was taking too much room in their cellars, but you can never tell what a publisher will do. I have been one myself.
... we made much less happy by the kindness of a great writer, which strictly speaking we find only in his books, than we suffer from the hostility of a woman whom we have not chosen for her intelligence, but whom we cannot stop ourselves from loving.
Theatre aside, my penchant for the extended monologue began with my reading of Browning's dramatic monologues, in high school. My inclination to adopt the form for prose was confirmed by Richard Howard's book of dramatic monologues, Untitled Subjects.
I am a book also, words and thoughts and stories held together by flesh. We open and close ourselves to the world. We are read by others or put away by them. We wait to be seen, sitting quietly on shelves for someone to bother having a look inside us.
I don't know what to do or where to turn in this taxation matter. Somewhere there must be a book that tells all about it, where I could go to straighten it out in my mind. But I don't know where the book is, and maybe I couldn't read it if I found it.
The first novel I wrote was a monster - clocking in at 180,000 words - but it died a death, a death it deserved. It was called 'The Gods First Make Mad.' It was a good title, but it was the only good thing about the book. I didn't let that put me off.
Writers aren't like plumbers. If you're a plumber, you fix one person's boiler in the morning, then you go and fix another in the afternoon. I didn't want to write a book unless I had something new to say - and it was good to live a little in between.
The secret of a good librarian is that he never reads anything more of the literature in his charge than the title and the table of contents. Anyone who lets himself go and starts reading a book is lost as a librarian...He's bound to lose perspective.
Eventually we even got to the point where we could disagree with [Bernard Leach]. I mean, when we first went there, gee, I mean, this was a man who had written a book. He was, in a sense, God, and we for the first couple of weeks called him Mr. Leach.
He looks at me, and I don't know what he sees. I used to think it was Rose. But she's not here with us now, in this room. It's just him and me, and the books. I feel like our lives are in those books. I feel like all the words on the pages are for us.
I always ask the booksellers to look at me and recommend a book; 9 out of 10, they get it right; it’s usually a book about someone dysfunctional. To me bookstores are like brothels of imagination, each book is luring me over going, 'Read me, read me'.
I only ask in all kindness that the man who wishes at this time to have my books will by no means let them be a hindrance to his own study of the Scriptures, but read them as I read the orders and the ordures of the pope and the books of the sophists.
I could not have taken what he took, sliding into second base and having a guy stand over you and spit on you, call you every name in the book. Believe me, for him not to respond, to ignore it and not retaliate, you can't say enough good about Jackie.
Given Pounds and five years, and an ordinary man can in the ordinary course, without any undue haste or putting any pressure upon his taste, surround himself with books, all in his own language, and thence forward have at least one place in the world.
It's a challenge of to write a narrator who is doing something that is really unlikeable and morally questionable. A lot of times, you read a book because you like the character, you are cheering for the character; you want the best for the character.
If your friend wishes to read your 'Plutarch's Lives,' 'Shakespeare,' or 'The Federalist Papers,' tell him gently but firmly, to buy a copy. You will lend him your car or your coat - but your books are as much a part of you as your head or your heart.
After 19 years of experimenting, a thousand mistakes, over 400 books, at least 200 bad diets... and a partridge in a pear tree, I have found what I believe are the best answers this planet has to offer about living a healthy, happy, and balanced life.