Pauline Kael Quotes
Quotes to Explore
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If only one in 1,000 people that I talk to goes on to write a good book, that's one more good book that I've helped along... and maybe it will be a book I love myself five or 10 years down the line.
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I've made up little mantras for myself, catchphrases from a screenwriting book that doesn't exist. One is 'Write the movie you'd pay to go see.' Another is 'Never let a character tell me something that the camera can show me.'
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The books that help you most are those which make you think that most. The hardest way of learning is that of easy reading; but a great book that comes from a great thinker is a ship of thought, deep freighted with truth and beauty.
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I read the Steve Jobs book, and that kind of changed everything. I've been, like, an Apple geek my whole life and have always seen him as a hero. But reading the book, and learning about how he built the company, and maintaining that corporate culture and all that, I think that influenced me a lot.
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One half who graduate from college never read another book.
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Writing books is a nice retreat. There's nothing quite like diving into a book for a few hours. That is a big time vacation.
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I must be like the princess who felt the pea through seven mattresses; each book is a pea.
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I'm going to name a name: Janet Evanovich. She writes the same book over and over, and I read every single one of them and eagerly anticipate them.
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A book is a gift you can open again and again.
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After 20 years, a million written words, and nine rejected novels, I finally landed a book contract.
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I'm a stand-up comic. I'm always doing dates; it's just that, if I'm working on a project or I'm busy, I can't get out on the road or book any shows. Since the beginning of my career, I'm usually out for at least 10-15 dates throughout the year. If I have time, then I try to get at least 30-40 dates.
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Every well-written book is a light for me. When you write, you use other writers and their books as guides in the wilderness.
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It's easier to release an ebook than a print book.
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I've always been fascinated by the brain. I wrote a lot about brain-tech in my first non-fiction book, 'More Than Human.' So when I decided to write science fiction, that was the technology I gravitated towards.
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Let us remember: One book, one pen, one child, and one teacher can change the world.
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For me, any book I'm writing is also a chance to get in and research and read and learn things that I maybe only knew a little bit about before.
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There's a market for mysteries for adults. That feeling of opening a book and delving inside and not coming out until you've closed the book.
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We did a play of 'Frog and Toad' at my elementary school. And I'm not sure if this is part of the book or it was something that we made up on our own, but I auditioned to play the black hole, which somehow makes sense to me.
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A novelist's lack of awareness of and critical distance to his own body of work is due to a phenomenon that I have noticed in myself and many others: as soon as it is written, every new book erases the last one, leaving me with the impression that I have forgotten it.
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I wouldn't care to speculate about what it is in Westlake's psyche that makes him so good at writing about Parker, much less what it is that makes me like the Parker novels so much. Suffice it to say that Stark/Westlake is the cleanest of all noir novelists, a styleless stylist who gets to the point with stupendous economy, hustling you down the path of plot so briskly that you have to read his books a second time to appreciate the elegance and sober wit with which they are written.
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Flowers are happy things.
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Facebook may not only propagate cyber-loneliness but exacerbate the pain of loss that estranged family members feel when they hear only indirectly, through a third-party posting, news of a child or parent with whom they have not spoken in years.
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A book might be written on the injustice of the just.