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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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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Shorter work - personal essays and book reviews - allow me to take a break from working on a book, which is good for the book and for its author.
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I write about five thousand words a day, when working on a book, about three thousand a day if I'm writing a short story. I take long periods off between projects, when I read a lot, garden, and think about the next book or stories.
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There will certainly be no lack of human pioneers when we have mastered the art of flight....Let us create vessels and sails justed to the heavenly ether, and there will be plenty of people unafraid of the empty wastes. In the meantime we shall prepare, for the brave sky-travelers, maps of the celestial bodies.
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Something is worth what somebody will pay for it. Nothing else, nothing more, nothing less.
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Ambition drives you on, ability certainly helps, but the fickle finger of fate and luck are great things.
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Autobiography is probably the most respectable form of lying.
