Book Quotes
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The information that was contained in a cathedral was based upon a common culture - a common Christian culture - and the elements were chosen for a common symbolic meaning. Someone who knew everything that was represented in a cathedral had a sort of encyclopedia - you can indeed call it that - but it was a selective encyclopedia, like encyclopedias back when they were books and the people writing them were supposed to be specialists in their field. I think today the problem is that people don't know how to choose between different kinds of information.
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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.
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I believe that, for those who love to write, time spent writing is never wasted. And then isn't it from book to book that we approach the book that we really want to write?
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M. J. Putney has created true magic with this book, the kind that comes when you curl up in a comfortable armchair and let the story take your imagination away. Come visit an enchanted eighteenth-century England and meet two desperate lovers caught in the web of a sinister lord with great magical power. Romantic and lyrical, this tale will fill your reading time with pleasure. I loved it.
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Sometimes I'll ask the book writer to write a monologue, not to be performed, just as if they were notes for the character.
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We’re all in the end-of-our-life book club, whether we acknowledge it or not; each book we read may well be the last, each conversation the final one.
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When confronted with a birthday in a week I will remember that a book can be a really good present, too.
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Everything we know has its origin in questions. Questions, we might say, are the principal intellectual instruments available to human beings. Then how is it possible that no more than one in one hundred students has ever been exposed to an extended and systematic study of the art and science of question-asking? How come Alan Bloom did not mention this, or E. D. Hirsh, Jr., or so many others who have written books on how to improve our schools? Did they simply fail to notice that the principal intellectual instrument available to human beings is not examined in school?
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This book was company for me - I wrote these things when I was in hotels, far from where I normally live. I never intended to publish it.
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You ever talk about a movie with someone that read the book? They're always so condescending. 'Ah, the book was much better than the movie.' Oh really? What I enjoyed about the movie: no reading.
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I try to know as much as I can about a book before the beginning, but I never know exactly where it's going to end.
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You ever buy a book and not read it? You feel almost guilty having it up on a bookshelf. People are like, "Hey, how's that book?" "I haven't read it." "Oh, did you just buy it?" "I've had it since high school." "Well, can I borrow it?" "No."
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When I pictured myself, it was always like just an outline in a coloring book, with the inside not yet completed. All the standard features were there. but the colors, the zigzags and plaids, the bits and pieces that made up me, Halley, weren't yet in place. Scarlett's vibrant reds and golds helped some, but I was still waiting.
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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.
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A classic is a book that has never finished saying what it has to say.
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I already optioned a book called The Personal History of Rachel DuPree. I also like The Book of Negroes by Lawrence Hill. And I love all of Octavia Butler's books. She's created some very complicated black heroines with a variety of belief systems. There are many great books out there, but those are a few of the ones that stand out.
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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.
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I love picture books. I think some of the best people in children's books are the ones who create their own picture books. I wish I could say I'm one of them, but I'm not.
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I remember attending Toronto Comicon shortly after the release of Captain Marvel and seeing a five-year-old girl who'd come in a handmade Captain Marvel outfit with her hair moussed up - and I totally got the need for this book, for this hero. Someone who looks like her, and acts like her. So, in a way, Captain Marvel helped pave the road to the expanded role of female leads.
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A book's flaws make it less predictable.
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My father was an angry and impatient teacher and flung the reading book at my head.
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Religion obviously played a role in this book and the previous book, too.
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I love what Max Landis is doing with 'Superman: American Alien.' That's a really good book.
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The cool thing about having a book is that it takes on its own life. Once it's in the world, you can't follow it. You'd have to have a pretty fantastic surveillance system to track its migration.
