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 have a musician friend who, after reading Mountains, told me, "When I read the book, I wanted to quit music altogether and become a doctor." I told him, "Do you really think you can be a better doctor than you are a musician? Nobody needs you as a lousy doctor. Just be the one-of-a-kind, brilliant musician you are, and divert your success somehow to benefit the poor." You can achieve so much more this way.
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What we've done, it seems to me, is allow women to get older, but not to age.
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I actually really wish I had written 'The Life-Changing Magic of Tidying' as an unreliably narrated novel that is also a self-help book.
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I like a little chaos. I think that's really true for my inner Buddha. I think I like a little nutsy. Maybe I can't take total peace.
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The child is father of the man: And I could wish my days to be Bound each to each by natural piety.
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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.
