Book Quotes
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A book read by a thousand different people is a thousand different books.
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I don't want to write things that people don't want to read. I would have no pleasure in producing something that sold 600 copies but that was considered very wonderful. I would prefer to sell 20,000 copies because the readers loved it. When I write books I don't actually think about the market in that way. I just tell myself the story. I don't think I'm talking to a 10-year-old boy or a six-year-old girl. I just write on the level the story seems to call for.
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If I want to write a movie, I'll write a screenplay, but if I have an idea for a book, it's something that I think can only be done novelistically.
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As a technology, the book is like a hammer. That is to say, it is perfect: a tool ideally suited to its task. Hammers can be tweaked and varied but will never go obsolete. Even when builders pound nails by the thousand with pneumatic nail guns, every household needs a hammer.
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If it's one thing we learned from the first book, it's that you don't have to be a prizefighter, or a world-renowned architect, or a concert violinist to have been affected by the power of words.
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There's something called the 'Washington Read,' which is the habit of many locals to go into a bookstore, pull a book off the shelf, rifle through the index to see if they're in there.
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The most important question for me when I begin working on a film is where to start. For a book, what makes you convinced there is a story that is worthwhile?
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I always felt once it goes into movie land, the book belongs to someone else.
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The creation is a very internal process, and publishing the book is a very external process. It is nice to see the book out in the world and people having the same reaction as when I created it. The point of all art is the emotional transference, and when that happens, the book has succeeded.
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I am disappointed by this controversy surrounding A Million Little Pieces because I rely on the publishers to define the category that a book falls within and also the authenticity of the work.
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What a sense of security in an old book which time has criticized for us.
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What public health really is is a trust. That's why I used the term 'Betrayal of Trust' as the title of my book. It's a trust between the government and the people.
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One of the things that did intrigue me about when I read the pilot - because I had not read the books before doing the show - was the mystery aspect of it. I didn't feel that it was just a crime-based story. It really does have that mystery element, and it felt like a throwback to other shows in the past that had a bit more of that. There was something iconic about it. The fact that it's set in Boston gave it a feeling that was different to me. So, I am definitely more of a fan of mysteries than I am of a circular crime-based genre.
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There's a point I set for myself, and it's an arbitrary point, when I think no matter happens, I'm going to finish that book. And that's when I get to page 100. I have to see it out.
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He liked slim books which he could slip into his overcoat pocket and leave there unread for months. What was the point of a book if you couldn’t carry it around with you as a theoretical defence against boredom?
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I feel like once I say out loud, to the public, what I'm working on, it's never going to be an actual book. So until it's close to done, I keep pretty quiet about my next stuff!
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There isn't a book that has changed me, but I have favourites such as 'Pride and Prejudice' which I often re-read.
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The time that it takes to make the feature is really contingent on the feature being sort of almost ready-made - so coming to a book is more ready-made. You at least have the story that someone sorted out.
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A quotation in a speech, article or book is like a rifle in the hands of an infantryman. It speaks with authority.
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I never expected to write a book about a slum in Ireland that was going to catapult me, as they say, into some kind of - onto the best seller list.
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A learned man is a sedentary, concentrated solitary enthusiast, who searches through books to discover some particular grain of truth upon which he has set his heart. If the passion for reading conquers him, his gains dwindle and vanish between his fingers. A reader, on the other hand, must check the desire for learning at the outset; if knowledge sticks to him well and good, but to go in pursuit of it, to read on a system, to become a specialist or an authority, is very apt to kill what suits us to consider the more humane passion for pure and disinterested reading.
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I'm floating between multiple media. I really wish you could buy the hardcover book and it would come with the digital download and audible version. I spend stupid amounts of money because I'm usually buying my books in at least two formats.
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I wrote the first version of this book in 1996, in the closing years of the twentieth century. Now, almost two decades into the twenty-first, it seems we are still struggling with what W. E. B. Du Bois identified in 1906 as the “problem of the color line,” even though the demographic composition of that color line has changed quite a bit since then.
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'Coraline' is Neil Gaiman's book, it sold a lot, it has a big fan base. It was originally conceived to be live action, but I never really wanted it to be. I always thought that it would work better as an animated film.
