Book Quotes
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The novels take longer to write than the picture book texts, and they do take a different sort of concentration. However, a very short, simple story that works well is just as exciting to me as any longer and more complex book.
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For every book you buy, you should buy the time to read it.
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I am a product [...of] endless books. My father bought all the books he read and never got rid of any of them.... I had always the same certainty of finding a book that was new to me as a man who walks into a field has of finding a new blade of grass.
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There's only one good test of pornography. Get twelve normal men to read the book, and then ask them, ''Did you get an erection?'' If the answer is ''Yes'' from a majority of the twelve, then the book is pornographic.
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If the real world were a book, it would never find a publisher.
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If you sell the film rights to your book, it doesn't mean there will be a film. I have sold the rights to five books and had zero films made. Take the money and be thankful.
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When struck by a thunderbolt it is unnecessary to consult the Book of Dates as to the precise meaning of the omen.
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Once you finish a book, it doesn't belong to you anymore. You're giving it to other people. If something in what a writer writes can excite the imagination and the feelings of the reader, then that reader carries it around forever. Nothing is more vivid than good fiction.
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My mother was not happy with the Afros that my friends and I emerged with - there's that crack in the book of 'Why, if a fly landed in there, he'd break his little wings trying to get out.' I was not pure dashiki, though - I was a combination of African dresses, miniskirts, tank tops, shawls, ethnic-looking earrings, sandals.
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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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When you learn about stories in school, you get it backward. You start to think 'Oh, the reason these things are in stories is because a book said I need to put these things in there.' You need a death, as my husband says, and you need a little sidekick with a saying like 'Skivel-dee-doo!'
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There was no really good true war book during the entire four years of the war. The only true writing that came through during the war was in poetry. One reason for this is that poets are not arrested as quickly as prose writers.
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Ah yes, the paradox of publicity is that even as we do it, we know it's killing off the chance of another reader happening across our book in the ideal state of innocence.
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Every book is a great action and every great action is a book!
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The reason I love comics more than anything else is that the longest story will be just a few pages. With a novel, it takes so many pages to get to one thing happening.
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All good books have one thing in common - they are truer than if they had really happened.
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I am an open book, and I'm fine being me: I'm not a perfect person.
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You think there's a rule book, in a way, until you realize there's absolutely no rule book, and you can use a red carpet to express something about yourself. There are so many wonderful designers in the world, and they create such wonderful things. Why go with something uninteresting?
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Marking a book is literally an experience of your differences or agreements with the author. It is the highest respect you can pay him.
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I rarely read or buy a book because of a review.
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There are people who are always, I think, going to remain people of the book, to use another author's title, but people of the book, who really must be around.
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The book of the moment often has immense vogue, while the book of the age, which comes in its company from the press, lies unnoticed; but the great book has its revenge. It lives to see its contemporary pushed up shelf by shelf until it finds its final resting-place in the garret or the auction room.
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By no means did my first book sell. I took a few runs at it. You'll never see those early efforts 'cause they're burned, straight to the fireplace where they belong.
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The first time I read an excellent book, it is to me just as if I had gained a new friend. When I read a book over I have perused before, it resembles the meeting with an old one.
