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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The parent reads the book. The kid reads the book and then they can talk about the characters instead of talking about themselves. You know there's a connection even if you don't talk about it when you read the same books.
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I get really excited if I think I'm going to introduce somebody to a writer they haven't found before and I think they'll love. My favorite books to get as gifts are any that the giver is messianic about.
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I've always had great respect for Paddington because he is amusingly English and eccentric. He is a great British institution and my generation grew up with the books and then Michael Horden's animations.
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I love clothes but it's a struggle for me to get out of jeans and a baggy jumper.
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Percy climbed the first step, then the next, remembering the thousands of times she'd run through the door, in a hurry to get to the future, to whatever was coming next, to this moment.
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Autobiography is probably the most respectable form of lying.
