Book Quotes
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The same sort of thing happened in my dispute with the National Trust book: Follies: A National Trust Guide, which implied that the only pleasure you can get from Folly architecture is by calling the architect mad, and by laughing at the architecture.
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One of the things I love about writing is the way you can use what you know and what you've experienced, without actually writing about yourself. I've given many of my experiences and perceptions to many of the characters in the book, but none of them is me.
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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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There can be no better prize for a writer than one awarded by an international book fair.
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The Bible was the only book he read. He didn't read it often but when he did he wore his mother's glasses. They tired his eyes so that after a short time he was always obliged to stop.
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'Perfect' is about a set-up that looks perfect from the outside - beautiful country house, beautiful wife and mother, everything where it should be - and the deep fissures that, in fact, lie beneath that. 'Perfect' was partly a response to the shock of my first book, 'The Unlikely Pilgrimage Of Harold Fry,' being a success.
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Sometimes, readers, when they're young, are given, say, a book like 'Moby Dick' to read. And it is an interesting, complicated book, but it's not something that somebody who has never read a book before should be given as an example of why you'll really love to read, necessarily.
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In my downtime, you'll mostly find me curled up with a book. I love reading biographies. My favourites are those of Dalai Lama, Osama Bin Laden, and Einstein.
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But suppose, asks the student of the professor, we follow all your structural rules for writing, what about that something else that brings the book alive? What is the formula for that? The formula for that is not included in the curriculum.
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I think that's what distinguishes YA from adult fiction - it's not just the age of the characters, but it's the sense of hope. Because I don't think I've ever read a YA book that feels completely hopeless at the end.
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I try to do that in this book without preaching - to try to do as you just said that you really have to defend the First Amendment rights of everybody.
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Here's how adaptation works - almost everything in the movie is in the book in some form. But it's as though the deck has been completely reshuffled and some of the cards have been assigned different values, some of the fours have been made into jacks, and some of the jacks have been made into twos.
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The process of writing a book is so removed in my mind from the process of publishing it that I often forget for great stretches that I eventually hope to do the latter.
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Any character that can't be kept straight, to me, isn't a character who should be in the book – you know, anyone not vivid enough to have a claim on my attention.
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I write so that people will read what I write. I don't want to write a book that a thousand people read, or just privileged people read. I want to write a book whose emotional truth people can understand. For me, that's what it's about.
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A novelist's lack of awareness of and critical distance to his own body of work is due to a phenomenon that I have noticed in myself and many others: as soon as it is written, every new book erases the last one, leaving me with the impression that I have forgotten it.
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Ten years ago we had a very simple yet powerful idea-call many of the greatest thinkers in the world, ask them each to write a chapter sharing their vision for the future of leadership, and put together an edited book titled The Leader of the Future.
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One of the things I did in my book, I start off with, is explaining how great our grace was: the things we were able to accomplish after the first one-hundred years from slavery.
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I enjoy very much being in a foreign country, in a new country, new place. And I enjoy also beginning a new book. It's like being someone else.
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I am now writing a book called 'Far Enough,' very loosely based on my childhood. This is difficult because it forces me to remember people I loved who are gone.
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To write a book about improvisation is partly a contradiction in terms. Improvisation is spontaneous. It's in the moment.
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I actually wrote my first zombie book way before I got the job on 'Saturday Night Live.'
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I collect books, and I love libraries. I love bookstores. And to me meeting a writer is important. And when I saw a book with my name on it I almost passed out.
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I had bill collectors chasing me. We were skipping from town to town, not leaving forwarding addresses. The agent couldn't find me when he sold my book. He finally found me.
