Book Quotes
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Open a Jewish daily prayer book used in any part of the world, and Zionism will leap out at you.
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For my generation - the "Children of Nixon," as I call us in the book - the Lebanese civil war was an iconic event. Downtown Beirut became a metaphor for so many things: man's inhumanity to man, what Charles Bukowski called "the impossibility of being human." It shaped our perceptions of war and human nature, just as Vietnam did for our parents. We used it to understand how the world works.
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The world is woman's book. [Fr., Le monde est le livre des femmes.]
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I dont really take anything from home except some U.S. magazines and books and definitely some U.S. music. There are just certain songs that remind me of home.
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The people who know me do not ask me about the next book or how it's going. They ask, 'Jason, are you sleeping?' because they know my brain will not shut down.
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Every book is its own experience, the writing of it.
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I remember how a man once got in touch with me to tell me that he was so engrossed in my book that he had to take a day off from work just so that he could finish reading it. Such kind of responses from my readers is extremely endearing, and it keeps me going.
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I like the varying rhythm of being a writer that you have a period of being in complete isolation where it's just you and the book and your screenplay and no-one can read it.
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I actually didn't listen to the Beatles song 'Nowhere Man' when I was writing my book of the same name. What I listened to a lot was 'Abbey Road.' Its disjointedness and its readiness to confuse only to delight were inspiring to me.
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The only process that comes close to the process of writing a whole book, in my experience, is childbirth. There is this moment when you think you can't possibly labour for another moment, and that, paradoxically, is when you have to push hardest.
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For the last 15 years that I have been performing, all I ever wanted to do was transcend poetry to the world. See, it wasn't enough for me to write a book. It wasn't enough for me to join a slam competition, and while those things hold weight, it wasn't the driving force that pushes the pen to the pad.
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My favorite book is always the one I'm working on at the moment.
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Say I lived until 80 and read a book a month seriously, that means I was looking at 480 books left in my life. If I had only 480 left, I wanted to stop sifting through material I didn't have confidence in and turn my attention to those that I know merited my reading.
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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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Any patch of sunlight in a wood will show you something about the sun which you could never get from reading books on astronomy. These pure and spontaneous pleasures are ‘patches of Godlight’ in the woods of our experience.
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Stephen King's 'On Writing' is probably the most useful writing book I've ever read.
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When I was 11, I knew that I wanted to write a kid's book and tell the world what it was like being deaf.
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I always have some way of putting the stories together that works for the book. I've always switched points of view in my books. I'm a Gemini.
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The book came after the fall of the Taliban, it says something about Afghan family life. Those kind of stories - what happens behind the scenes on a TV screen - are important.
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Paperbacks weren't considered real books in the book trade. Up till then it was just murder mysteries, potboilers, 25-cent pocket books sold in newsstands. When the New York publishers started publishing quality paperbacks, there was no place to buy them.
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[On her and husband Michael Dorris:] We both have title collections. I think a title is like a magnet. It begins to draw these scraps of experience or conversation or memory to it. Eventually, it collects a book.
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I can tell you that the book 'The Ugly Truth' is about puberty and all the awfulness that comes with that time in a person's life. It was definitely some different subject matter to be writing about, especially knowing some of my audience are second and third graders.
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I'm very impressed by the imagery in the 'Apologia', which is a kind of sustained poem. It's not just a piece of apologetics of the sort you find in Jesuit literature: 'Why I came over', and so on. It's a tremendously rewarding book but requires perseverance on the part of the reader.
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I read all the time. I was reading a book I admire very much by Alice McDermot called Charming Billy.
