Book Quotes
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Is the prestige conferred by the Man Booker prize for the book or me? I would prefer it on the book and for me to be treated ordinarily.
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My readers have to work with me to create the experience. They have to bring their imaginations to the story. No one sees a book in the same way, no one sees the characters the same way. As a reader you imagine them in your own mind. So, together, as author and reader, we have both created the story.
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You can learn a line from a win and a book from a defeat.
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To me, writing is a very physical process. I lay out the entire book with the two narratives side by side on my bedroom floor, and just get down on my hands and knees and start looking at it in that physical space. "Does this really follow from this? Should this be here or elsewhere?" I will literally cut the paper into paragraphs. I'll cut it into segments and move the segments around from one narrative to the other until I feel that I've found the natural structure.
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I wrote the first book, and I thought people would say: 'Separate and unequal schools in the City of Boston? I didn't know that. Let's go out and fix it.'
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A good picture book should have events that are visually arresting - the pictures should call attention to what is happening in the story.
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Once in a very long time you come across a book that is far, far more than the ink, the glue and the paper, a book that seeps into your blood.
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Art is a gift: you create and then you give away. How readers receive that gift is their business. If they hate it, that’s their response to it. Others respond by liking it. Either way, that is their interaction with the book, which is no longer mine.
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There is nothing more inimical to writing than the spirit of fundamentalism. Fundamentalism abhors the play of signs, the endlessness of writing. Fundamentalism means nothing more or less than going back to an origin and staying there. It stands for one founding book and, thereafter, no more books.
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It used to be a lot easier to get a book deal.
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If I don't book a job, I like to see it not as a rejection but as a redirection to something different.
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A crow, who had flown away with a cheese from a dairy window, sate perched on a tree looking down at a great big frog in a pool underneath him.
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There's a lot of sub-conscious stuff you may write but you don't then suddenly sit down and take out your analytical books and say: I'm determined to find out where this came from. You'd probably be wrong anyway.
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I've learned to really love revision over the years and worked hard to build up my craft muscle to make my revisions less and less painful with each book.
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Life's too slippery for books, Clarice; anger appears as lust, lupus presents as hives.
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As a state legislator, I had worked with Republicans and Democrats to pass a number of bills, including some related to higher education and juvenile justice; I'd created what would become San Antonio's largest book drive and literacy campaign.
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I was focused on building things from an early age. When I was about 3, our toilet broke, and my mother was ready to call the plumber. I told her I would fix it and asked her to get my Richard Scarry book 'How Things Work in Busytown.' Between the picture of a toilet and the text she read to me explaining how the parts worked, I fixed it.
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The difference between the extras here and in France is the French extras read books. Actually, they hide the book and pretend that they're acting. Here, you can see everybody wants his break.
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Pictures are very important. I remember at home we had illustrated editions of Rudyard Kipling's 'Just So Stories' and 'The Jungle Book,' which were read to me. Living in Zimbabwe made it very real, especially the 'Just So Stories' with the 'great grey-green greasy Limpopo.'
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In the chapter on the nature of the atonement [in the book saving Calvinism] I argue that it is a mistake to think that penal substitution is the only option on the doctrine of atonement.
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For a while we were chasing a book by Graham Greene to do Brighton Rock as a musical. We didn't get the rights, so we decided to create something from scratch, with Jonathan. By that time we were big fans of his work.
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I think, especially when you're in college, each book that you're reading tends to tell you who you are.
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As an author, you hope for a director and a cast that will make something wonderful out of your book.
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A book calls for pen, ink, and a writing desk; today the rule is that pen, ink, and a writing desk call for a book.
