Book Quotes
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I read 'Holes' in 10th grade, and I haven't read a full book since. The movie version with Shia LaBeouf was OK, but the book was way better.
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When reading a book, be very certain that you never go past a word you do not fully understand. The only reason a person gives up a study or becomes confused or unable to learn is because he or she has gone past a word that was not understood.
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I've learned that you really cannot judge a book by its cover.
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What that book does for me is give me the tools in the same way that I had the tools when I learned the regular scales or the alphabet. If you give me the tools, the syntax, and the grammar, it still doesn't tell me how to write Ulysses.
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When I was young I longed to write a great novel that should win me fame. Now that I am getting old my first book is written to amuse children.
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If there’s a zeppelin, it’s alternate history. If there’s a rocketship, it’s science fiction. If there are swords and/or horses, it’s fantasy. A book with swords and horses in it can be turned into science fiction by adding a rocketship to the mix. If a book has a rocketship in it, the only thing that can turn it back into fantasy is the Holy Grail.
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Writing a book is not as tough as it is to haul thirty-five people around the country and sweat like a horse five nights a week.
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If a writer I represent gets a bad or unfair review, I suffer. I'm upset and outraged and do everything I can to try and change that. But I would never do that on behalf of my own book because I wouldn't expect my writers to do that.
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We were just trying to make the films that we could get made, and to push the envelope. We didn't realize how far we had pushed the envelope. That all came later. That all came from books and articles about the golden age of the '70s. Believe me, to a lot of us, it was no golden age. The studio heads were very powerful then. They would fire guys right and left. They would look at your dailies and tell you what was wrong with them... a lot of stuff that doesn't go on today. Young filmmakers who are successful today, they don't often have that to put up with.
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Publishers just want you to write the same book over and over again. But why would I want to do that? It would be like putting on a threadbare dressing-gown day after day.
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Great nations write their autobiographies in three manuscripts - the book of their deeds, the book of their words and the book of their art.
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I don't know if I've ever derived such an immediate sense of calm and well-being from any book as I did from 'Right Ho, Jeeves.' It was like I was Pac-Man and the book was a power-up.
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When I created Quirke, he was 6ft 6in and blond. But then a woman reader wrote to me and said, 'Why do you keep saying his hair is blond? It's not. It's brown.' I wrote back to her and told her that, of course, she was right. So I darkened his hair and now that he's being played by Gabriel Byrne; with each successive book he gets a bit smaller and smaller.
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I wrote a story for my kids. It's fiction. It's not systematic theology. It's not a new book of the Bible. It's flawed, I wrote it. All of that goes into the mix, but I love the controversy. It elevates the conversation.
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Keep thy foot out of brothels, thy hand out of plackets, thy pen from lender's books, and defy the foul fiend.
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I came to a dead stop and began major revisions. Sometimes these entailed the shredding of all existing manuscript for a fresh start - an inefficient way to write a book, though I found it exciting.
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I got beat up by the comic-book kids when I was younger! They were cooler than me. Talk about levels of geekdom, I was a couple rungs below the kids who read comic books. Yeah. Not so cool, man.
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My favorite is always the book that I'm currently reading.
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When I was 13, I read 'Et la paix dans le monde, Docteur?' a physician's account of working with Medecins Sans Fontieres during the Soviet presence in Afghanistan. It was this book that inspired me to work for MSF.
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Book-learning scarcely tells me Of severe afflictions after death-bed; And such as have heard my bardic books They shall obtain the region of heaven, the best of all abodes.
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As adults, we've seen so much before that we often turn the pages of a picture book without really looking. Young children tend to look more carefully.
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I think it's a very old and deep-seated double standard that holds that when a man writes about family and feelings, it's literature with a capital L, but when a woman considers the same topics, it's romance, or a beach book - in short, it's something unworthy of a serious critic's attention.
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When you read books, you kind of create that whole world in your mind, and you go on a journey with the author of that book. I think that's really a good thing.
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I just wrote a book, but don't go out and buy it yet, because I don't think it's finished yet.
