Humphrey Carpenter Quotes
Quotes to Explore
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It takes me a long time writing books. It takes me about five years to write a book, and when I'm done, the last thing I want to do is to do it again.
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One half who graduate from college never read another book.
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I don't really read 'business books,' and I didn't think 'The Paradox of Choice' was a business book. I'm very surprised and gratified that the business world thought it was one.
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Black people were very angry with me for writing the book. A lot of people didn't believe me, or didn't want to believe me, and that used to really bother me. It was a very painful and difficult time.
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I have considered rap music stars, and there is one in my new book, Lovers and Players, and there is also a hip-hop music mogul who I think you will like a lot.
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In a typical history book, black Americans are mentioned in the context of slavery or civil rights. There's so much more to the story.
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A subject which at first glance seems quite removed from the undeclared concern of the book can encapsulate that concern.
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While I'm writing, I'm also the first reader, and I want to write a book where I'm excited about what happens next.
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Housekeeping is incredibly difficult with three kids. I'm trying to be more relaxed. You'll go insane if you try to have a picture-book house.
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You don't have a soul; you are your own soul. In other words, you are not this book, your social security card, your body, or your mind. You are you.
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Is 'The Wind in the Willows' a children's book? Is 'Alice in Wonderland?' Is 'Treasure Island?' These are masterpieces which we read with pleasure as children, but with how much more pleasure when we are grown-up.
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You can get through your whole day only around people who will tell you that you're wonderful. But pretty soon they're going to have to be lying about that.
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But especially he loved to run in the dim twilight of the summer midnights, listening to the subdued and sleepy murmurs of the forest, reading signs and sounds as a man may read a book, and seeking for the mysterious something that called - called, waking or sleeping, at all times, for him to come.
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And the world said, Child, you will not be missed.You are cheaper than a wrench, your back is a road;Your death is a table in a book. You had our wit, our heart was sealed to you:Man is the judgment of the world.
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Dedication: To my daughter Leonora without whose never-failing sympathy and encouragement this book would have been finished in half the time.
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A good book is never exhausted. It goes on whispering to you from the wall.
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It this book is, very simply, an account of how three primitive societies have grouped their social attitudes towards temperament about the very obvious facts of sex-difference.
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Sometimes I'll get a premise, you know, for a book. In fact, I get those quite often. And I don't commit to it until I really know the voice of that character. It's almost as if the character is speaking to me.
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Even the worst book can give us something to think about.
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Gratitude to gratitude always gives birth.
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To write is a relief from life's problems. It is a way in which you revenge yourself. In art, the writer achieves utopia. But any attempt to achieve social utopia is bound to catastrophe. If you want a society of saints, the result is hell, repression, totalitarianism, and persecution.
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We planted bugs, microphones, in premises which interested us in the West. We weren't too successful - I would have said unfortunately in former years, but I don't care anymore now.
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The word "hope" I take for faith; and indeed hope is nothing else but the constancy of faith.
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Autobiography is probably the most respectable form of lying.
