Josef Skvorecky Quotes
There is something that falls short of perfection in every book, without exception, something influenced by the age, even something ridiculous; just like everyone, without exception, has weaknesses.
Quotes to Explore
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Every child needs to have for itself not only its loving parents and siblings and friends of its own age, but a grown-up friend.
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The thing about women playing boys is that we're not going to age, and we're not going to go through puberty in the middle of a long-running series.
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Readers want to have the confidence that you understand the era in which the book is set, so for 'The Perfumer's Secret,' I needed to know everything about the First World War from a French perspective. I had to understand those people and that town in 1914.
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Modesty is good. But not when it comes at the cost of honesty.
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One half who graduate from college never read another book.
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Hope is not a matter of age.
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I never want to write a book just to tell a story. There is always something deeper going on.
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I always tell young actors to have a back-up. You don't want to find yourself at the age of 30 still struggling to make a living out of acting.
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A book is a gift you can open again and again.
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I have to write what I can write, and writing the text of a picture book is like walking a tightrope, if you ramble off... As my friend Julius Lester says, 'A picture book is the essence of an experience.'
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I enjoy it too much - even if I knew I'd never get a book published, I would still write. I enjoy the experience of getting thoughts and ideas and plots and characters organised into this narrative framework.
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Size matters in fiction, but so does lack of size. Everything else being equal, fat novels tend to be perceived as serious, very thin ones as more honest, more real. Writers address these age-old expectations by filling their big books with philosophy and cramming their little ones with feeling.
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You have to understand that while I pre-plot the meta story of a given book, I often have no idea of what will happen on the next page, let alone the next chapter. That's what makes it fun for me; I write the books the same way many people read them.
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Let us remember: One book, one pen, one child, and one teacher can change the world.
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'Holes' was my favorite book ever. So you know when you love a book and you hear it's being made into a movie and it makes you a little annoyed at first? But I would've loved to play the Shia LaBeouf role in that movie when I was younger. I just wanted to be the rebellious kid on the old digging camp.
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A tactic used by authors of virtually every single book I've ever read that propounds a conspiracy theory is to attack an agency as being part of a conspiracy in the Kennedy assassination, but when this same agency comes up with something favorable to the author's position, the author will cite that same agency as credible support for his argument.
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I have a strong dance background. I danced from age five until 18, and that helps a lot. Doing a fight routine is like doing a dance routine.
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Oh I'm a huge comic book movie fan.
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I grew up in the GOP sandbox. My dad took me, age 7, to meet Herbert Hoover, in his apartment at the Waldorf Towers. He gave me a silver dollar. Being a young Republican, I spent it on comic books.
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The question always arose from both fans and friends was, 'Have you ever done 'Star Trek,' and if not, would you want to?' And the answer was always, 'No, I haven't, and yes, I would love to!' So now, at the age of 57, I can finally say, 'I'm in the new Star Trek!' And I'm so excited about it!
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I’m sure there’s some self-help cheese-ball book about the gray area, but I’ve been having this conversation with my friends who are all about the same age and I’m saying, ‘Y’know, life doesn’t happen in black and white.’ The gray area is where you become an adult the medium temperature, the gray area, the place between black and white. That’s the place where life happens.
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There's no difference between a pessimist who says, "Oh it's hopeless, so don't bother doing anything." and an optimist who says, "Don't bother doing anything, it's going to turn out fine anyways. Either way, nothing happens."
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I think I did fifteen long features and fifteen documentaries, or something like this, which is very little when you think of people making a film every year. Some people have done fifty or sixty films.
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There is something that falls short of perfection in every book, without exception, something influenced by the age, even something ridiculous; just like everyone, without exception, has weaknesses.
