Book Quotes
-
The book is not really the container for the book. The book itself is the narrative. It's the thing that people create.
-
Words are the only things that last for ever.
-
Crime fiction has always been what I wanted to read, so when I sat down to write my first book, it was naturally the way that I was going to go.
-
I don't think anybody reads a book of poetry front to back. Editors and reviewers only. I don't think anybody else does.
-
The New York book was a visual diary and it was also kind of personal newspaper. I wanted it to look like the news. I didn’t relate to European photography. It was too poetic and anecdotal for me… the kinetic quality of new york, the kids, dirt, madness—I tried to find a photographic style that would come close to it. So I would be grainy and contrasted and black. Id crop, blur, play with the negatives. I didn’t see clean technique being right for New York. I could imagine my pictures lying in the gutter like the New York Daily News.
-
There are numerous cases of that, where one of our writers discovers another writer whom he likes, and we then take that book on. So it's a very close relationship. We can do that because we're so small.
-
I found myself jealous of the people who wrote the books. They were dead and they were still taking up my time. Who did they think they were?
-
Whenever one writes a book one should have a notional reader in mind.
-
AHA!" interrupted Officer Shrift, making another note in his little book. "Just as I thought: boys are the cause of everything.
-
The only sort of book I care to write about the war is the sort people will read after the war is over — a century after it is over.
-
Somewhere, everywhere, now hidden, now apparent in what ever is written down, is the form of a human being. If we seek to know him, are we idly occupied?
-
All my big heroes are literary, writers. I'd love to meet Jimmy Hendrix or John Coltrane, but I'd much rather meet Thomas Wolfe, or F. Scott Fitzgerald. Words and books have always meant a lot to me. That someone can take words and string them together to where they will move me is just a hell of a thing. It's amazing to me; more amazing to me than music or painting. It's always been the written word or the spoken word, like a great lecture or a great lyric, or a great poem. To me it's just amazing. And I always aspire toward capturing that, or my version of it.
-
We have a small UK tour booked and some studio time and a lot of drinking and partying and talking like pirates! Hahaha!
-
A book should push the reader to confront himself and the world.
-
I envy the people who say, 'oh, well, I've got my name in the golden book and I'm going to be entered into the pearly gates.'
-
Majestic and stately as Conrad Richter''s Awakening Land Trilogy, Evangeline is a big book from a big mind.
-
What can be better than to get out a book on Saturday afternoon and thrust all mundane considerations away till next week.
-
We give scholarships to high school kids and a new library of books to every preschool child in the county where I was born. I didn't have books at home so I did all my reading at school. I love books and I believe that helping kids to read gives them a great start in life.
-
I was very interested in vaudeville. It was the only sort of discipline that was a five-minute act on stage, which is what I really enjoyed and saw myself doing. And I bought books on it.
-
I hope my books make statements about our general condition.
-
I'm a pretty open book, so not being out publicly felt inauthentic. Hopefully we can get to a point where your personal life isn't anybody else's business, but until then, it's less about people having to know about your sexuality than standing up for what's right and fighting for equality.
-
For me, a lot of Discipline was very personal writing, like writing through and working out being inside this gendered body and also the compulsions of the body, the muting of the mind as driven by the body. My father had died some years ago so he haunts the book too, just floats through it ghost-like. But, the writing of every book is different for me. They are so like living creatures, these books, so I don't know what's carried over into the writing of the next things - except maybe that I'm best when I make my writing practice a routine.
-
I would hate to be that person who is, you know, the mystery writer who has to deliver a book every year to publisher X.
-
I relaxed my customary aversion to consulting a book by anyone so immensely pratty as to put 'Ph.D.' after his name (I don't put Ph.D. after my name on my books, after all - and not just because I don't have one).
