Book Quotes
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What's happening to movie critics is no different from what has been meted out to book, dance, theater, and fine-arts reviewers and reporters in the cultural deforestation that has driven refugees into the diffuse clatter of the Internet and Twitter, where some adapt and thrive - such as Roger Ebert - while others disappear without a twinkle.
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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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I don't have any delusions. I'm not a novelist - I'm a comedian who writes. I love doing the stand-up and the touring and the albums and all that, but it's pretty amazing to go into a library and see your book there.
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It comes back to the old question: How can the Bible be so wise in some places and so barbaric in others? And why should we put any faith in a book that includes such brutality?
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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.
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It's better to be nominated for awards than not to be nominated for them, but of course to some degree such awards National Book Award are always subjective.
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The librarian spoke in a reverential whisper. Corliss knew she'd misjudged this passionate woman. Maybe she dressed poorly, but she was probably great in bed, certainly believed in God and goodness, and kept an illicit collection of overdue library books on her shelves.
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The style, often found difficult in the earlier books, is just as individual but more perfectly modulated to experience, and the dialogue is much closer to contemporary idiom, especially when those cadences have been masterfully twisted to satirical ends.
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Perfection is something we should all strive for. It's a duty and a joy to perfect one's nature... The most difficult thing is love. A loveless, driving person that just competes in the rat race is far from perfection in my book.
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An actors real job is going on lots of auditions! When you book the job that's the fun part!
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Exclusive will not be published in book format.
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This is a political book... It has a political purpose: to strengthen the will to maintain freedom against the threat of its abandonment in favor of totalitarianism.
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TV's not the problem, and I'm tired of it being posed as this antithesis to creativity and productivity. If TV's getting in your way of writing a book, then you don't want to write a book bad enough.
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I hope my books make statements about our general condition.
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I was in school for literature, and read so many 19th century and early 20th century novels that it was hard to break out of that and read an average Jeanette Winterson book or something.
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The rain is playing its soft pleasant tune fitfully on the skylight, and the shade of the fast-flying clouds across my book passed with delicate change.
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I like to think that each book I start is a completely new departure But I’ve learned that whatever you do, readers will have no difficulty assimilating it into what you’ve done before.
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When you have a book out, it's like a period of protracted or concentrated megalomania, and it's really not normal or good for you or any of that.
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I don't think I'll write a large novel again because it was like being in jail for me. Even though that's the funniest book I've ever written, it was the saddest period of my life.
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The highest praise a writer can give another is to say he wishes he had written his book. I wish I had written Forty Words for Sorrow. Giles Blunt has a tremendous talent. If you miss Forty Words for Sorrow, you'll miss one of best novels of 2001.
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I try consciously to keep myself entertained and challenged to not repeat myself at all. Like, when I start a new book, my goal is to pretty much throw out what I've done and try something completely different that I think initially I cannot do.
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I usually plan to read a book for a half-hour before bed, but then I end up staying awake until 3 A.M. to finish it. Fortunately, my dog doesn't mind when I keep the bedside lamp on.
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I always feel very afraid as I work on books. It's just so hard to write a decent book!
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'Dare to Discipline' was published in 1970 in the midst of the Vietnam War and a culture of rebellion. The book was written in that context, but the principles of child rearing have not changed.
