Quotes of All Topics . Occasions . Authors
Before I begin a novel I have a strong sense of at least one central character and how the story begins, and a more vague sense of where things may wind up, but at some point, if the novel is any good at all, the story and characters take on lives of their own and take over the book, and the writer has to be open to that.
The good news (for writers) is that this means that ebooks on computers are more likely to be an enticement to buy the printed book (which is, after all, cheap, easily had, and easy to use) than a substitute for it. You can probably read just enough of the book off the screen to realize you want to be reading it on paper.
What I wish is that people would look beyond the tribbles and see I've written some other books that I really would like people to notice. There's The Man Who Folded Himself, there's The Martian Child, which is about my son and the adoption. There's The War Against The Chtorr, which is my magnum opus, my great epic story.
There has never been a book like this. At once a poetics of place, a work of deep history, a bildungsroman, and an acute inquiry into the big subjects: love, family, other animals, the nature of creativity. It is sublime. It's also very funny. Haunting and haunted, Hold Still is the memoir of an artist that is art itself.
My mother is a huge fan of my work. I told her about 'Coraline' long before the film was made, and she got the book and read it. She reminded me that when I was about five years old, I used to sit in the kitchen for hours and talk about my 'other' family in Africa, my other mother and father. I had totally forgotten that.
'Liberal Fascism' is less an expose of left-wing hypocrisy than a chance to exact political revenge. Yet, the title of his book aside, what distinguishes Goldberg from the Sean Hannitys and Michael Savages is a witty intelligence that deals in ideas as well as insults - no mean feat in the nasty world of the culture wars.
About thirty years ago, Miss Maria Ward of Huntingdon, with only seven thousand pounds, had the good luck to captivate Sir Thomas Bertram, of Mansfield Park, in the county of Northampton, and to be thereby raised to the rank of a baronet's lady, with all the comforts and consequences of an handsome house and large income.
I learned very early on not to speak to my folk from on high, but to get down with them, beside them, showing them how to act rather than telling them. And I suggested that they should do the same with one another: that they didn't need a book of rules to tell them what to do and what not to do, but experience and action.
Some of my fondest and most impressionable movie memories are from those early sci-fi and horror films. I've always been a Dracula/vampire aficionado, being half-Romanian myself. Dracula has always been close to my heart - in fact, I have a first edition of Bram Stoker's book. I read it over and over again as a young kid.
My rage is gone, And I am struck with sorrow. Take him up. Help, three o' th' chiefest soldiers; I'll be one. Beat thou the drum, that it speaks mournfully, Trail your steel spikes. Though in this city he Hath widowed and unchilded many a one, Which to this hour bewail the injury, Yet he shall have a noble memory. Assist.
I can't trace thematic similarities between Then We Came To The End and The Unnamed to a life event; I think it's more just a natural progression as a writer. Everything changes in the second book - tonally, character-wise, situationally - and on top of that, I think I wanted a challenge. I wanted to see if I could do it.
I admire Virginia Woolf so much that I wonder why I don't like her more. She makes the inner things real, she does illumine, and she makes relationships realities as well as people. But I remember the intensity, the thrill, with which I read 'Passage to India.' How I would have hated anyone who took the book away from me.
This is the Book. I have read the Bible through many times, and now make it a practice to read it through once every year. It is a book of all others for lawyers, as well as divines; and I pity the man who cannot find in it a rich supply of thought and of rules for conduct. It fits man for life--it prepares him for death.
You most likely need a thesaurus, a rudimentary grammar book, and a grip on reality. This latter means: there's no free lunch. Writing is work. It's also gambling. You don't get a pension plan. Other people can help you a bit, but essentially you're on your own. Nobody is making you do this: you chose it, so don't whine.
Certainly with a book, people are going to be able to read it and give themselves permission to have that delicious feeling of being terrified because they're in a safe place while they're reading. That's what you can rely on as a writer, that people can let themselves be really frightened because they're really all right.
The way the housing market imploded is obviously not an easy thing to explain. It's a little bit easier in a book - people can take their time, you can sort of go back and reread - but in a movie you've got two hours to not only explain things like collateralized debt obligations, but you also have to make it entertaining.
Henceforth it will be the task of this Sacred Congregation not only to examine carefully the books denounced to it, to prohibit them if necessary, and to grant permission for reading forbidden books, but also to supervise, ex officio, books that are being published, and to pass sentence on such as deserve to be prohibited.
A man is like a two-story house. The first floor is equipped with an entrance and a living room. On the second floor is every family member's room. They enjoy listening to music and reading books. On the first underground floor is the ruin of people's memories. The room filled with darkness is the second underground floor.
I was the sensitive, shy kid that was teased a lot. I was very definitely bullied. I mean, from an early age, I dressed more like an adult, you know, jackets and very slim trousers and a raincoat. And I - even when I was 7, 8, 9-years-old, carried an attache case to school because I just hated the sloppiness of a book bag.
I doubt that VR will really replace the quality of books. If you want to go into let's say the Prado in Madrid and you want to go into Hieronymus Bosch or whatever, you'd rather go into books and you take your time and it's sitting there all day long and you go back and revisit it and it becomes part of your physical life.
What I can say is that it was clear to many of us that an indigenous African literary renaissance was overdue. A major objective was to challenge stereotypes, myths, and the image of ourselves and our continent, and to recast them through stories- prose, poetry, essays, and books for our children. That was my overall goal.
The very cheapness of literature is making even wise people forget that if a book is worth reading, it is worth buying. No book is worth anything which is not worth much; nor is it serviceable, until it has been read, and re-read, and loved, and loved again; and marked, so that you can refer to the passages you want in it.
If you want to pontificate, I'm certainly willing to pontificate. That's why Joely was laughing because you don't know what you asked for. Malcolm Gladwell, in his newest book "David and Goliath," writes about how sometimes things that we think of as handicaps often times are just the opposite. Or the reverse is also true.
The people themselves begin to clamour for an education which shall qualify their children for life rather than for earning a living. As a matter of fact, it is the man who has read and thought on many subjects who is, with the necessary training, the most capable whether in handling tools, drawing plans, or keeping books.
My theory about writing is that one should write books you'd like to read, but no one else has written yet. So, as long as I stick with that, I'm entertaining myself, and then hopefully my readers as well. I hope to god I realize that I'm repeating myself, if I ever do. But if I don't, I'm sure my readers will let me know.
The book known by the name of the Apocalypse, has seemed to be until now unintelligible, merely because people persisted to see in it a real prediction of the future, which every one has explained after his own fashion, and in which they have always found what they wanted, namely anything but that, what the book contained.
Let me roughly divide books into those which compete with the movies and those with which the movies cannot compete. They are the books that can elevate or instruct. If they are fine works of fiction, they can deepen your appreciation of human life. If they are serious works of nonfiction, they can inform or enlighten you.
Al Bernstein has seen cable television sports grow up. In 30 Years/30 Undeniable Truths he looks at his time in the industry through a prism that is unique to him. This book gives the reader an insight into the sometimes absurd world of television sports. There is a 31st undeniable truth: Al Bernstein is a truly funny man.
I had read [Charles] Dickens's novels were often published serially. I thought it would be fun to write a book, just sitting down and writing a chapter every day, not knowing what would happen next. So that's how I wrote the first draft. And then of course I had to go back and make sure everything worked and change things.
If you do a little bit of looking at books with your children and inspire them to be curious about the pictures and ... what the word means, but don't get into very structured systematic teaching at too early an age, and you also interact emotionally and have fun with pretend play ... then you have the best of both worlds.
I both didn't know Owen [Suskind] beforehand and didn't have any connection to the autistic community. But Owen wasn't really a problem, because he participated in the writing of the book and wanted people to see him as he truly is. As far as the cameras, Owen lives in the moment and the cameras really didn't distract him.
I love kids that come to shows, little kids coming up to you with braces; like, some kid came up to me in a parking lot outside a show in Santa Cruz - he was about 14 or 15 - and he said, 'Y'know, I love 'The Basketball Diaries,' but I hope your next book of poetry isn't gonna be as academic as 'Living at the Movies' was.'
As the 2012 elections approach the finish line, the chatter among columnists and political reporters is about upcoming books that take readers inside the campaigns, cutting-edge efforts to micro-target voters on Internet social applications, the enormous money flowing through super-PACs, and extreme political polarization.
Helen Weaver’s book was a revelation to me! Although I was a young woman in the fifties, I was there, but I wasn’t there! This is the most graphic, honest, shameless and moving documentary of what the newly liberated women in cities got up to–how they lived, loved and created. Who knew? It is time they did! And here’s how.
The library is not a shrine for the worship of books. It is not a temple where literary incense must be burned or where one's one devotion to the bound book is expressed in ritual. A library, to modify the famous metaphor of Socrates, should be the delivery room for the birth of ideas - a place where history comes to life.
[Herschel and Humboldt] stirred up in me a burning zeal to add even the most humble contribution to the noble structure of Natural Science. No one or a dozen other books influenced me nearly so much as these two. I copied out from Humboldt long passages about Teneriffe and read them aloud on one of [my walking excursions].
One of the things that makes characters real is details. Life offers a lot of details. You just have to choose and use them wisely. When you give them to fictional people and a fictional story, their purpose and their meaning changes, so it's best to see the version in the book as fiction entirely, wherever it started out.
For me, being a rap fan and the nostalgia of me being a kid, rappers and guys on the street told me everything to wear. That was it. I didn't necessarily read too many fashion books. Then it got competitive in junior high school. It was moreso about, "You don't got these." Everybody could be fresh, but you don't got these.
Ultimately, I want a peak experience in reading, and that is sometimes difficult to find in contemporary fiction. I'm not interested in books that are just clever and well executed; polish doesn't impress me, and I don't care about a merely capable sentence. Life is short; I want a confrontation with high art. I want soul.
There's a book called Mummy and the people actually seem to have become addicted to mummy dust. And mummy dust was somehow made from people who've died of the most loathsome diseases. It's too bad that [David] Cronenberg didn't see this book, see I only saw it after the film was made. It might have been of interest to him.
The book recounts stories from my half-century of experience in the world of architecture and my journey of discovery of the importance of considering humans and nature as part of any project. It’s illustrated with my own watercolors I hope it will inspire the next generation of architects to design places we can all enjoy.
I think theres just this mystique of writing a book that appeals to people. A person has to really check their motives and say, Am I really being called by God to do this? Or is this just something that would look neat in my funeral? I dont mean to be harsh but I think a person really needs to, so they wont be disappointed.
As time passed I became an avid reader of popular scientific books, wanting to know as much as I could about the world in which I lived. Gradually I began to see a pattern of nonsense in much scientific writing. Scientific explanations given regarding the origins or functioning of various phenomena simply didn't make sense.
The nice thing about a series is you can end on cliffhangers all the time. You can be like, 'You know what? Here we go, this person just died, end of book.' And with the end of the series, you're very conscious of all the plotlines that were left hanging. There's a balance there to wrap those up but still leave it exciting.
I've always said if somebody wrote a book and they took their whole life to learn that knowledge in that book, why you won't just read that book to learn what they know? I have never seen anyone take a book combining Faith, personal Development and life stories that are just so practical and relatable to our own generation.
It is a magic book. Words mean things. When you put them together they speak. Yes, sometimes they flatten out and nothing they say is real, and that is one kind of magic. But sometimes a vision will rip up from them and shriek and clank wings clear as the sweat smudge on the paper under your thumb. And that is another kind.
Everyone is born creative; everyone is given a box of crayons in kindergarten. Then when you hit puberty they take the crayons away and replace them with dry, uninspiring books on algebra, history, etc. Being suddenly hit years later with the 'creative bug' is just a wee voice telling you, 'I'd like my crayons back, please.
I have a confession to make. The love affair of my life has been with the Greek language. I have now reached the age when it has occurred to me that I may have read some books for the last time. I suddenly thought that there are books I cannot bear not to read again before I die. One that stands out a mile is Homer's Iliad.
Some people, in order to discover God, read books. But there is a great book: the very appearance of created things. Look above you! Look below you! Read it. God, whom you want to discover, never wrote that book with ink. Instead, He set before your eyes the things that He had made. Can you ask for a louder voice than that?
In solitude the mind gains strength, and learns to lean upon herself; in the world it seeks or accepts of a few treacherous supports--the feigned compassion of one, the flattery of a second, the civilities of a third, the friendship of a fourth--they all deceive, and bring the mind back to retirement, reflection, and books.