Book Quotes
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Beware of books. They are more than innocent assemblages of paper and ink and string and glue. If they are any good, they have the spirit of the author within. Authors are rogues and ruffians and easy lays. They are gluttons for sweets and savories. They devour life and always want more. They have sap, spirit, sex. Books are panderers. The Jews are not wrong to worship books. A real book has pheromones and sprouts grass through its cover.
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In a weak moment, I have written a book.
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God wrote a book on suffering, and its name is Jesus.
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Be as careful of the books you read, as of the company you keep, for your habits and character will be as much influenced by the former as the latter.
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The world is the book of women. Whatever knowledge they may possess is more commonly acquired by observation than by reading.
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My father taught me to love detective fiction writers such as Raymond Chandler. When I decided to have a hard-boiled detective series I did a lot of studying before I wrote the first book. I learned police procedure, the California criminal law, and many areas outside my expertise.
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(in response to the question: what do you think of e-books and Amazon’s Kindle?) Those aren’t books. You can’t hold a computer in your hand like you can a book. A computer does not smell. There are two perfumes to a book. If a book is new, it smells great. If a book is old, it smells even better. It smells like ancient Egypt. A book has got to smell. You have to hold it in your hands and pray to it. You put it in your pocket and you walk with it. And it stays with you forever. But the computer doesn’t do that for you. I’m sorry.
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I had loved magic tricks from the time I was six or seven. I bought books on magic. I did magic acts for my parents and their friends. I was aiming for show business from early days, and magic was the poor man's way of getting in: you buy a trick for $2, and you've got an act.
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Kansas City Lightning succeeds as few biographies of jazz musicians have. . . This book is a magnificent achievement; I could hardly put it down.
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I have argued tirelessly, nearly endlessly, in so many books, about the need for the social, the economic reconstruction of society. The demand that people be present themselves, that they contribute to the reorganization of society, that they own up to their own complicity in a system from which they derive benefit and advantage, often without acknowledgement, and the discomfort, the uncomfortable way in which that must be acknowledged.
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He's still a few weeks away from what the book says, but strength-wise he appears to be solid. What's the magical day is hard to determine. I think the doctors will evaluate him on today and see if he can't start doing some work.
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It is not only the content of a book that changes you but the shared community with those who have read it, discussed it, argued about it.
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One of the reasons I'm able to write books and still carry on with other work is that I do my best writing between 5am and midday.
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Memoir today is like one big game of misery poker: The more outlandish, outrageous, or just plain out-there the recounted life, the more likely the book is to attract the attention of reviewers, talk-show bookers, and, ultimately, the public.
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I think it would be bad to a truly successful celebrity person, because I know these novelists where people get a cult following, and they have some strange personal attachment to them because it's so personal to read a book.
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Comic books are what novels used to be - an accessible, vernacular form with mass appeal - and if the highbrows are right, they're a form perfectly suited to our dumbed-down culture and collective attention deficit.
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In 2011, I earned a Tony nomination for my role in 'The Book of Mormon.'
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Eventually we even got to the point where we could disagree with Bernard Leach. I mean, when we first went there, gee, I mean, this was a man who had written a book. He was, in a sense, God, and we for the first couple of weeks called him Mr. Leach.
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With "Margaret," I remember clearly it was, you know because I did remember it clearly. I was young. I was young in terms of experience and what did I know about and I had an incredible memory from my own childhood. And so it never occurred to me to write for any other age group. And I thought I'm going to write a book and I'm going to tell the truth.
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I'm interested in adapting books and all sorts of things.
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I've worked with the Los Angeles Zoo for 45 years, and we have this magnificent photographer, Tad Motoyama. He takes these wonderful, wonderful animal pictures. All through the years he's given me copies of these pictures. Well, I have all these gorgeous ones, so I said, 'Tad, I want to do a book with your picture on one side.'
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A book's flaws make it less predictable.
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Every time I finish a book, it's my favorite. I have a lot of favorites. I did just finish Jane Eyre and it was fabulous. I didn't want it to end.
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I grew up really into comic books, and I actually thought I was going to be a comic-book artist. That was my ambition before I realized I couldn't keep characters looking the same from panel to panel.
