Book Quotes
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You just want to find a story that grabs you and that you've never seen before, but somehow you can't imagine it not existing. It's like a good book. What makes a good book is hard to say. I don't know. I just look for something that grabs me. I don't have a way of looking for a project, and I don't know many people that do. It's just year to year, and what's going around and what's there.
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When I first quit my day job, I was terrified. I called my editors and said I'm trying to make a go of this, and they threw every contract at me they could. And for two years, I had a book or an anthology out every month.
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No murder or sin or act of barbarism or cruelty has ever been committed by a person fully absorbed in the reading of a book. By this fact alone, we can conclude that readers are nicer people, at least until they put the book down. When we are reading, we are better.
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There's so much more to the book than the page you were stuck on.
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I do reread, kind of obsessively, partly for the surprise of how the same book reads at a different point in life, and partly to have the sense of returning to an old friend.
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Some people don't like my fiction, because they prefer the nonfiction. But moving around keeps the work fresh for me and, hopefully, for my one or two readers who follow me from book to book!
Colson Whitehead -
I feel that form determines how readers read a book and how they judge it.
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There is no publication in the scientific literature - in prestigious journals, specialty journals, or books - that describes how molecular evolution of any real, complex biochemical system either did occur or even might have occurred.
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If it's a good work of adaptation, the book should remain a book and the film should remain a film, and you should not necessarily read the book to see the film. If you do need that, then that means that it's a failure. That is what I think.
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First rule of writing: When still a child, make sure you read a lot of books. Spend more time doing this than anything else.
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Honestly, I get character ideas from the most inane places. Sometimes a song will give me an idea. Sometimes I will just hear a snippet of conversation that ends up having nothing to do with the book that emerges.
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Do not read good books-life is too short for that-read only the best.
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A man's action is only a picture book of his creed.
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Promised Lands was a better book in my opinion, and it's still my mother's favorite of the three I've done, but I doubt anyone who isn't a blood relative has ever heard of it. Which is to say expectations aren't worth much in the book world.
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I was learning book-keeping at the age of 12, but it never stopped me from pursuing literature. Over the years, I grew to love the written word.
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In this book we turn to the study of new patterns of energy arising from man’s physical and psychic artifacts and social organizations. The only method for perceiving process and pattern is by inventory of effects obtained by the comparison and contrast of developing situations. (p. 8)
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I wrote and illustrated a science experiment book called 'The Mad Professor'.
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I don't think I've ever read an old book through from start to finish. Not after more than six months after writing it, that is.
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A novel with a bad middle is a bad book. A bad ending is something I've just gotten in the habit of forgiving.
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The book is called 'A House in the Sky' because during the very, very darkest times, that was how I survived. I had to find a safe place to go in my mind where there was no violence being done to my body and where I could reflect on the life I had lived and the life that I still wanted to live.
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I write different kinds of sentences, depending on what the book is, and what the project is. I see my work evolving. I'm writing long sentences now, something I didn't use to do. I had some kind of breakthrough, five or six years ago, in Invisible, and in Sunset Park after that. I discovered a new way to write sentences. And I find it exhilarating.
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It is in the book of man, not the book of god, that we must look for examples of heroism, love, pity, justice, truth, honor, humanity.
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Painting is the only universal language. All nature is creation's picture book. Painting alone can describe every thing which can be seen, and suggest every emotion which can be felt. Art reaches back into the babyhood of time, and is man's only lasting monument.
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If you take a book of a thousand pages on the Second World War, in which 50 million people died, the concentration camps occupy two pages and the gas chambers ten or 15 lines, and that's what one calls a detail.
