Quotes of All Topics . Occasions . Authors
A book is a physical object in a world of physical objects. It is a set of dead symbols. And then the right reader comes along, and the words—or rather the poetry behind the words, for the words themselves are mere symbols—spring to life, and we have a resurrection of the word.
Thomas Mann used to write education novels and now you can write an education memoir, and there are all these memoirs coming out now about people's relationships with books. Like anything else, these can be good or bad. The genre doesn't make it good or bad, it's the execution.
'Tracks' is based on the book by Robyn Davidson who, in the mid-Seventies, decided to leave the city, go to the outback, learn to train camels and walk across the Australian desert to the ocean: a journey that is about two thousand miles and will take about six or seven months.
You need that pride in yourself, as well as a sense, when you are sitting on Page 297 of a book, that the book is going to be read, that somebody is going to care. You can't ever be sure about that, but you need the sense that it's important, that it's not typing; it's writing.
Everyone has bad days, and when you're having a bad day, you think, 'Here I am being singled out by a hostile, malicious universe that is picking exclusively on me.' And then you read a book about bad days and realize they happen to everyone, not just tormented, persecuted you.
I suppose also that watching marketing and publicity stuff play out from behind the scenes, making those plans and seeing each piece fall into place or not, each year, for each book, has made me a little more tranquil about the process for my own book than I might otherwise be.
Welcome to my world! I've been through it all, and I often pinch myself to believe my luck. I design jewlery, create cosmetics, perform comedy, act, lecture, write books, travel, have a fabulous daughter, and a phenomenal grandson-and I feel I'm the luckiest woman on the planet.
All these people helped make this book possible. But let me make one thing clear: If there are any errors or omissions in this book, these people are not responsible. In the end, there is only one person responsible for what I write, and that person, of course, is: Donald Trump.
Chris [Nolan] comes at this with such a different take on Batman, so I didn't feel that I had to be true to any other actor playing this role. Of course, I read the comic books. His relationships with Lt. Gordon and with Batman, with Gotham City, those really helped me the most.
I had simply been inspired by Arthur Godfrey (40's) and Ukulele Ike and Cliff Edwards (20's). In there day, they were huge in this country. I bought Godfrey's book "You Too Can Learn To Play Ukulele" and taught myself. It's a very romantic instrument. You can take it on a canoe.
There's no such thing as the greatest album ever. There's no greatest book, greatest human, greatest movie. At a push, the closest record to perfection I know is What's Going On by Marvin Gaye or The Beach Boys' Pet Sounds but possibly because they are widely recognized as such.
Don't lament so much about how your career is going to turn out. You don't have a career. You have a life. Do the work. Keep the faith. Be true blue. You are a writer because you write. Keep writing and quit your bitching. Your book has a birthday. You don't know what it is yet.
Kerry James Marshall especially was a huge influence on me in graduate school, as were Wangechi Mutu and Julie Mehretu. These artists are titans. My education was also very much in comic books, so I've been going to comic book events in New York and have met a few artists there.
Words move, turning over like tumbling clowns; like certain books and like fleas, they possess activity. All men equally have the right to say, 'This word shall bear this meaning,' and see if they can get it across. It is a sporting game, which all can play, only all cannot win.
Books on prayer are good, but not good enough. As books on cooking are good but hopeless unless there is food to work on, so with prayer. One can read a library of prayer books and not be one whit more powerful in prayer. We must learn to pray, and we must pray to learn to pray.
Coolidge was a pragmatist. He didn't start out with a tax theory. But he observed over time that lower tax rates sometimes brought in extra revenue. The success of his and Treasury Secretary Andrew Mellon's experiment with rate cuts has been obscured by our modern history books.
As a four-year-old, my mother told me I was climbing the fence, jumping off and calling myself an 'eppyplane'... I bought books on aeroplanes, I followed everything in the newspapers about aeroplanes. Amy Johnson flew to Australia in 1930 - why couldn't I do something like that?
Most critics don't realize that a novel like One Hundred Years of Solitude is a bit of a joke, full of signals to close friends; and so, with some pre-ordained right to pontificate they take on the responsibility of decoding the book and risk making terrible fools of themselves.
I would need a book to describe Jamal Miles. He can do it all. We line him up in the slot. We bring him into the backfield. We hand the ball to him. We send him in motion and get him the ball. He throws the football. He might be the best athlete I've ever been around in my life.
I abide by a rule concerning reviews: I will never ask, neither in writing nor in person, that a word be put in about my book.... One feels cleaner this way. When someone asks that his book be reviewed he risks running up against a vulgarity offensive to authorial sensibilities.
I have an enduring, very robust infatuation with dictators. I have an infatuation with Stalin, Mao, and Mussolini. In the Paris Review interview I did (in 2013), I said my next book, this one, was going to be about Mussolini. I wound up only having a Mussolini cameo in the book.
However you look at it, in these books "power" tends to be an expression of the essential nature of the person or being whose power it is. On those occasions when we've seen Lord Foul act directly, he seems to exert the withering force of pure scorn. IMHO, that's pretty intense.
First drafts are for learning what your novel or story is about. Revision is working with that knowledge to enlarge and enhance an idea, to re-form it.... The first draft of a book is the most uncertain-where you need guts, the ability to accept the imperfect until it is better.
I've always wanted to be a poet at the beginning. I would look at my grandparents' books and my parents' books. And in my family, a typical aspirational Jewish family, being a writer was very much exalted, and it seemed impossible to me, that I could ever do something like that.
She surrounded herself with books at work and at home. Her living space was a testament to her first and abiding love with shelves jammed with books tables crowded with them. She saw them not only as knowledge entertainment comfort even sanity but as a kind of artful decoration.
And I have finally realized that, you know, it's not a given that my lifespan will accommodate my writing aspirations. It could be that it would take me 12 more books at six years each to get it - which means I would have to live to be 126. Which I fully intend to do, of course.
A bran' new book is a beautiful thing, all promise and fresh pages, the neatly squared spine, the brisk sense of a journey beginning. But a well-worn book also has its pleasures, the soft caress and give of the paper's edges, the comfort, like an old shawl, of an oft-read story.
What you believe someone else can or can't do hasn't got beans with the doing. Or lack of doing. Just go back through your history books and you'll discover that just about everything you take for granted today in your daily lives was absolutely impossible not so many years ago.
I have heard Mr. Romney's speech's many times on television and the radio and I have even read his book No Apology: The Case for American Greatness and I must say that out of all the gentleman running for the presidency Mr. Romney is, in my opinion, the best one to fit the bill.
The thing you start noticing as books go by, is that you become aware not only of a shape of a career, but of your themes and interests. You don't want writing tricks where you make the same joke every time, but you do start to notice what consumes your mind, or what drives you.
Sometimes you write and you find yourself almost wondering how it will turn out. I don't think every writer sort of almost admits that at some stage his books can take on their own kind of life it selves and simply lead away into directions that they're not kind of prepared for.
I feel a kind of reverence for the first books of young authors. There is so much aspiration in them, so much audacious hope and trembling fear, so much of the heart's history, that all errors and shortcomings are for a while lost sight of in the amiable self assertion of youth.
Gardening is really an extended form of reading, of history and philosophy. The garden itself has become like writing a book. I walk around and walk around. Apparently people often see me standing there and they wave to me and I don't see them because I am reading the landscape.
This is, in part, why there is less magic in the world today. Magic is secret and secrets are magic, after all, and years upon years of teaching and sharing magic and worse. Writing it down in fancy books that get all dusty with age has lessened it, removed its power bit by bit.
I first got really interested in Noh in about 1977. There was an independent bookstore in Bloomington, Indiana where I was going to high school. It was a really nice place. There was a New Directions paperback. It was the Pound/Fenollosa book, 'The Classic Noh Theatre of Japan.'
You meaner beauties of the night, That poorly satisfy our eyes More by your number than your light; You common people of the skies, What are you when the sun shall rise? This was printed with music as early as 1624, in East's Sixth Set of Books, and is found in many manuscripts.
During the course of the day, I write things down, things I don't do anything with. Then, when I get ready to start recording, I just look through my books and I see if I can find something that stands out. That's how I come up with the off-the-wall-kinda-strange-indirect-stuff.
He was the crazy one who had painted himself black and defeated the world. She was the book thief without the words. Trust me, though, the words were on their way, and when they arrived, Liesel would hold them in her hands like the clouds, and she would wring them out like rain.
I have always loved and avidly read the novels of Jack London, Jules Verne and Ernest Hemingway. The characters depicted in their books, who are brave and resourceful people embarking on exciting adventures, definitely shaped my inner self and nourished my love for the outdoors.
Intensely moving but never sentimental, Academy Street is a profound meditation on what Faulkner called 'the human heart in conflict with itself'. In Tess Lohan, Mary Costello has created one of the most fully realized characters in contemporary fiction. What a marvel of a book.
Unlike other books or TV shows or sometimes life, my narrative worlds are stripped of implicit moral centers. There is only what you bring. That makes the characters risky in every way and the narrative, a journey of change for the reader. But I make the journey as fun as I can.
Here's my rule: You always want to pay cash for your own books, because if they look at the name on the credit card and then they look at the name on the book jacket, then there's this look of such profound sympathy for you that you had to resort to this. It really is withering.
I think bridges have a special meaning in our life. I think a book is a bridge. Any type of art is a bridge that allows different cultures to connect. You may not understand your neighbour's way of seeing life, but you sure understand your neighbour's joy in painting or dancing.
Suppose you went to your priest and asked for help; he would refer you to the Bible. But if you went the next day to your medical doctor and he referred you to the book of Hippocrates, which was written at about the same time as the Bible, you would think that was old-fashioned.
All my books are made up of other books. They're all deeply structured on other fiction, because I was a student in fiction and I didn't have much actual living to draw on. I suspect a lot of other people's novels are like that, too, though they might be slower to talk about it.
All of my characters are a little bit based on people I know in real life. You know when you do that you have to change the character a little bit in case your friend or your relative reads the book, because you don't want them to know you wrote about them... They might get mad.
My books are not about different components that fit together like pieces in a jigsaw puzzle, it's about creating the space around the components, which is almost as important as the components themselves. And that space changes and blends depending upon what the components are.
As many people have pointed out, the scene in ‘Kung Fu Hustle’ where the Landlady was chasing after me resembled the Roadrunner, … I loved to watch cartoons and read comic books when I was small. In fact, I still watch and read a lot of them now. They give me great ideas.
Jack Campbell's dazzling new series is military science fiction at its best. Not only does he tell a yarn of great adventure and action, but he also develops the characters with satisfying depth. I thoroughly enjoyed this rip-roaring read, and I can hardly wait for the next book.
Most established novelists are writing books informed by experiences gained in their youth. Middle age is not the best time to be changing smartphones every six months or adopting new technology platforms - because we tend to get slower and less accommodating to change as we age.