Book Quotes
-
I read this book a few decades ago, on a trip to some of the territories of the old Byzantine Empire, during which an emotional relationship came to an emotionally draining end, so it may retain some of the hectic inanity of my personal life, but great works are fractal, reflecting both our grand ambitions and our petty failures.
Alexander Jablokov
-
The text moves like a small crustacean with compound eye and complex nervous system; throbbing, involuted, it becomes a parasite on a different body, animal, using ‘filiform protrusions through which it sucks the vital juices of its host.’ Parasite or creature in mutation on the shore, torrid / delirium: mordant mortality, systematic competition the narrator against the I, leaking gas, a lapse of memory against a promise, an inset in a book. A muscular, involuntary bulging in the breast, circling all its inner surface: mesoblast: visceral.
Nicole Brossard
-
Illustrators are word people who happen to draw. We work with one foot in a book, the other stuck in a paint pot. Our shoes are a disgrace.
Wallace Tripp
-
When Howard Marks came out of prison, years later, I met him at a concert in South Wales; I was a young whippersnapper and Howard was kind of an outlaw hero. I said to him - and it's on tape, a cousin of his filmed our meeting - I said, "If you write a book, I want to play you in a movie." He said, "Let's shake on it," and we did. Thirteen years later, there we were, making the movie.
Rhys Ifans
-
Sir Walter Elliot, of Kellynch-hall, in Somersetshire, was a man who, for his own amusement, never took up any book but the Barontage; there he found occupation for an idle hour, and consolation in a distressed one; . . .
Jane Austen
-
I think her Grandmother Hall gave her a great sense of family love, and reassurance. Her grandmother did love her, like her father, unconditionally. And despite the order and the discipline - and home at certain hours and out at certain hours and reading at certain hours - there was a surprising amount of freedom. Eleanor Roosevelt talks about how the happiest moments of her days were when she would take a book out of the library, which wasn't censored.
Blanche Wiesen Cook
-
I never used an outline until I started "The Bourne Legacy" project for which I was required to write an outline. To be honest, I thought I'd hate the idea, assuming that if I'd thought of all the ideas at the outset I'd have to incentive to actually write the book, because for me part of the joy of writing are the surprises you come upon as the book takes shape. But something curious and exciting happened. As I wrote the outline, some sections would be very detailed, others quite sketchy, so that whole portions of the book would be covered by one line, such as "Bourne is chased by Khan through Budapest," which when I wrote the novel turned out to be 40-50 pages! Now I'll never write a novel without first doing an outline. Looking back on it, I used to get bogged down in extraneous characters and situations, especially during the first 100 pages (which I find the most difficult to write) that I would later have to scrap, wasting time and energy, and frustrating me. Now that never happens.
Eric Van Lustbader
-
When Molly O'Toole was looking at the colored pictures in Mrs. Piggle-Wiggle's big dictionary and just happened to be eating a candy cane at the same time and drooled candy cane juice on the colored pictures of gems and then forgot and shut the book so the pages all stuck together, Mrs. Piggle-Wiggle didn't say, "Such a careless little girl can never ever look at the colored pictures in my dictionary again." Nor did she say, "You must never look at books when you are eating." She said, "Let's see, I think we can steam those pages apart, and then we can wipe the stickiness off with a little soap and water, like this-now see, it's just as good as new. There's nothing as cozy as a piece of candy and a book.
Betty MacDonald
-
The Book of Air and Shadows' was born during a conference with an intellectual property lawyer on a particular afternoon in November of 2003.
Michael Gruber
-
His words had tossed the book that was her life into the air and the pages had been blown into disarray, could never be put back together to tell the same story.
Kate Morton
-
Books are but waste paper unless we spend in action the wisdom we get from thought - asleep. When we are weary of the living, we may repair to the dead, who have nothing of peevishness, pride, or design in their conversation.
William Butler Yeats
-
I write a thousand words a day. Nothing will stop me, I mean nothing, until the book is finished. I'm disciplined in spite of myself.
Joseph Wambaugh
-
The book, as it stands, seems to me to be one of the most frightful muddles I have ever read, with scarcely a sound proposition in it beginning with page 45, Hayek provided historical background up to page 45; after that came his theoretical model, and yet it remains a book of some interest, which is likely to leave its mark on the mind of the reader. It is an extraordinary example of how, starting with a mistake, a remorseless logician can end up in bedlam.
John Maynard Keynes
-
One of the nice things about moving from acting to writing is that your work can be in the public eye without having to be in the public eye yourself. I guess that's not completely true. If you're lucky - and I have been - there are book tours and lectures. I don't have stage fright, and I enjoy meeting people, so that's easy and enjoyable, but it's not a constant, and it's not celebrity.
Debra Dean
-
I read a lot of literary theory when I was in graduate school, especially about novels, and the best book I ever read about endings was Peter Brooks' 'Reading for the Plot. '
Lev Grossman
-
I don't belong to any club or group. I don't fish, cook, dance, endorse books, sign books, co-sign declarations, eat oysters, get drunk, go to church, go to analysts, or take part in demonstrations.
Vladimir Nabokov
-
I want to describe the Body as a Book, a Book as a Body, and this Body and this Book will be the first Volume of Thirteen Volumes.
Peter Greenaway
-
I've got lots of books sitting here that have never been published because nobody could make any marketing sense of them.
Whitley Strieber
-
I tell my students, if you're interested in marine biology or llama farming, follow that string. Yes, it will probably take you a longer time to write that book, but it's not a race. That's another great thing about being a writer: you don't age out.
Debra Dean
-
A book is a garden, an orchard, a storehouse, a party, a company by the way, a counselor, a multitude of counselors.
Charles Baudelaire
