Book Quotes
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So-called real life has only once interfered with me, and it had been a far cry from what the words, lines, books had prepared me for. Fate had to do with blind seers, oracles, choruses announcing death, not with panting next to the refrigerator, fumbling with condoms, waiting in a Honda parked round the corner and surreptitious encounters in a Lisbon hotel. Only the written word exists, everything one must do oneself is without form, subject to contingency without rhyme or reason. It takes too long. And if it ends badly the metre isn't right, and there's no way to cross things out.
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Everyone says I should write a natural history or landscape book because if I have an area of amateur expertise, it is in those things.
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Now a writer can make himself a nice career while he is alive by espousing a political cause, working for it, making a profession of believing in it, and if it wins he will be very well placed. All politics is a matter of working hard without reward, or with a living wage for a time, in the hope of booty later. A man can be a Fascist or a Communist and if his outfit gets in he can get to be an ambassador or have a million copies of his books printed by the Government or any of the other rewards the boys dream about.
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Writers who want to interfere with adaptations of their work are basically undemocratic. The book still stands as an entity on its own.
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Grandmaster games are said to begin with novelty, which is the first move of the game that exits the book. It could be the fifth, it could be the thirty-fifth. We think about a chess game as beginning with move one and ending with checkmate. But this is not the case. The games begins when it gets out of book, and it end when it goes into book..And this is why Game 6 [between Garry Kasparov and Deep Blue] didn't count...Tripping and falling into a well on your way to the field of battle is not the same thing as dying in it...Deep Blue is only itself out of book; prior to that it is nothing. Just the ghosts of the game itself.
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It actually got me upset reading about adopted children. They become junkies or criminals or actors. I wanted to write a book from the children’s point of view.
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Even while writing his book, he had become painfully aware how little he knew his own planet while attempting to piece together another one from jagged bits filched from deranged brains.
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I'm a pretty open book.
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And what could be a hotter ticket than the improbable triumph of 'The Book of Mormon,' the musical-comedy moon shot of the season? Its creators, Matt Stone and Trey Parker, of Comedy Central's 'South Park,' are the most unlikely Rodgers and Hammerstein team ever to bowl a thundering strike.
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I write about it in the book and, you know, explain that. But that was the technicality that actually got my sentence reduced - that Alan Dershowitz used to have my sentence - it came down eventually to eight years.
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As long as I can buy records and books and maybe some clothes, I'm pretty stoked. I don't need a yacht or anything.
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Whenever one writes a book one should have a notional reader in mind.
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When I was twelve. And I was going through my parents' bookshelves, I found the most wonderful books and plenty of. Within those wonderful books that were real turn-on's. At 12 or 13, books were such turn-ons.
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You're lucky if people like your book, and the more people that like it, the luckier I feel.
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While we read a novel, we are insane—bonkers. We believe in the existence of people who aren't there, we hear their voices... Sanity returns (in most cases) when the book is closed.
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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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My fears are the obvious ones: that marketplace-minded publishers - all four of them - will shy further away from literary fiction, international authors, poetry, and the other marginal but hugely important regions of the book world.
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To me, making a CD is like writing a book.
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The book-worm wraps himself up in his web of verbal generalities, and sees only the glimmering shadows of things reflected from the minds of others.
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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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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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I was under twenty when I deliberately put it to myself one night after good conversation that there are moments when we actually touch in talk what the best writing can only come near. The curse of our book language is not so much that it keeps forever to the same set phrases . . . but that it sounds forever with the same reading tones. We must go out into the vernacular for tones that haven't been brought to book.
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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.
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I started writing at the kitchen table after midnight. It took ten months to finish that first book; I sent it to a publisher and I got some kind of prize, so it was like a dream - I was surprised to find it happening.
