Book Quotes
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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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I have quite a close relationship with violence and horror. They are enjoyable and terrible. I try and offset the horror with a sense of satisfaction or humor. You can't write a book that is entirely dark without having little spots that hopefully make you laugh out loud.
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My life has been pretty unconventional. The publishers saw a story in it, and yes, my life has been put in a book.
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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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The Bible is the proper book for men. There the truth is distinguished from error far more clearly than anywhere else, and one finds something new in it every day. For twenty-eight years, since I became a doctor, I have now constantly read and preached the Bible; and yet I have not exhausted it but find something new in it every day.
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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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I like some of Annie Proulx, some of those very brief stories of hers. And I love J. M. Coetzee's Elizabeth Costello. I like Geoff Dyer. I also liked W. G. Sebald, especially his book 'The Emigrants'.
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Writing a book is like running a marathon. You need to be fit to do it, mentally and, as far as possible, physically.
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If I don't have the books to read, if I don't have the information to study, how can I succeed? That's a lot of the stuff I would focus on if I was elected because I think knowledge is power.
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On the other hand, I still approach each book with the same basic plan in mind - to put some people under severe stress and see how they hold up.
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You should always judge a book by its lovers.
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Normally book ideas come to me in a moment.
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The EU Kids Online project is the most theoretically informed and methodologically sophisticated study we have on the issue of risks in the new electronic environment. This book is rich in details and insights that greatly advance our understanding.
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The best time to start promoting your book is three years before it comes out. Three years to build a reputation, build a permission asset, build a blog, build a following, build credibility and build the connections you'll need later.
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I don't ever write with a particular audience in mind. I just write books that please me.
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I've got lots of books sitting here that have never been published because nobody could make any marketing sense of them.
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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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I'm jealous of everyone discovering Lovesey and Diamond for the first time-you have a wonderful backlist to catch up on. Me, all I can do is wait for the next book.
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Take a book, the poorest one written, but read it with the passion that it is the only book you will read. Ultimately, you will read everything out of it, that is, as much as there was in yourself, and you could never get more out of reading, even if you read the best of books.
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My age is my own private business and I intend to keep it so - if I can. I am not so old that I am ashamed of my age and I am not so young that I couldn't have written my book and that is all the public needs to know about my age.
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I've never wanted to be a witch, but an alchemist, now that's a different matter. To invent this wizard world, I've learned a ridiculous amount about alchemy. Perhaps much of it I'll never use in the books, but I have to know in detail what magic can and cannot do in order to set the parameters and establish the stories' internal logic.
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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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Tom Paine was a great American visionary. His book, Common Sense, sold a couple of hundred thousand copies in a population of four or five million. That means it was a best seller for years. People were thoughtful then. Hope is one thing. But you need to have hope with thought.
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So many (too many) books are published every year, and it seems everyone is writing a book. Perhaps we should all be reading more and writing less!
