Book Quotes
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When I was nine I spent a lot of my time reading books about the history of comedy, or listening to the Goons or Hancock, humour from previous generations.
Paul Merton
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The passion has never left me. I live as two people - myself, Dan Fante, and Bruno Dante or Mickey Di Salvo, or whoever I say I am in one of my books. I can tap that Bruno character any time I need to. He lives inside me like a quiet, simmering pool of magma. Years ago I stopped feeding him with booze and he was kind enough to stop trying to kill me. That's our truce.
Dan Fante
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Anytime you start doing a comic book with mythology attached, people are like, "Are you going to get it right? It's important to me."
Tom Cavanagh
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My books have been translated into various languages and sold in other countries, but I never have any contact with the foreign publishers and am so disconnected from that process that it seems almost imaginary. With 'How to Save a Life', I worked closely with Usborne editors and have been involved in the publicity.
Sara Zarr
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I think that The Second Sex will seem an old, dated book, after a while. But nonetheless, a book which will have made its contribution. At least, I hope so.
Simone de Beauvoir
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You believe in a book that has sticks turning into snakes, and you say we are the ones that need help?
Dan Barker
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Horses in the Book of Mormon would be another. You have relatively few mentions of horses, but there are some, and we don't know exactly how they were used; they don't seem to be all that common. Were they horses as we understood them, [or] does the term describe some other animal? Languages don't always and cultures don't always classify things the way we would expect. We have what we call common-sense ways of doing it. They're not common sense; they're just ours. But again, we don't have a strong case there. We're just problem solving there.
Daniel C. Peterson
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If you have a book to write, write it. If you want to record an album, record it. No need to wait for someone in a cubicle halfway across the country to decide if you're worthy.
Seth Godin
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I guess you could say that the Bible is a book that doesn't try to tell you what to think. Instead, it tries to teach you how to think. It stretches your thinking; it challenges you to think bigger and harder than you ever have.
Brian D. McLaren
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Though I have never thought of myself as a book collector, there are shelves in our house browsed so often, on so many rainy winter nights, that the contents have seeped into me as if by osmosis.
Hilary Mantel
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The difference between a novelist and someone who tinkers around with writing is this: novelists finish their books.
Nancy Etchemendy
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I must say, some are not very beautifully made. They’re coffee-table books for people who drink alcohol. I have nothing against coffee-table books as long as they are well done. They must not look like gravestones on a table. Sometimes they are too big, they come in boxes and things like this. No, a book has to be easy to open and you don’t have to be a bodybuilder to lift it. I like books I can read in bed. Those big tombstones would kill me.
Karl Lagerfeld
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I'm grateful for the likes of Kundera, Murnane, Markson, Berger, and, in his recent work, Coetzee. But no matter how celebrated they are, critics still consider them askance. Elizabeth Costello, for example, is a great novel, but it got quite a critical panning when it was published. The complaint was that it was simply a book of speeches, without the machinery of conventional fiction. Markson's books are compilations of facts and alleged facts, very artfully.
Teju Cole
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The way I feel about every book is this: you don't finish it, you abandon it. All of my books have in some sense failed, otherwise I wouldn't write another one. If I wrote the perfect book, I wouldn't have to write again, and I wouldn't want to. That's not true for everyone, but it's true for me. I could walk away then. But so far I haven't managed to do it.
Russell Banks
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It is no fun at all to have been writing a book for seven or so years, especially when you've never published anything before.
Chad Harbach
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Sequencing - the careful striptease by which you reveal information to the reader - matters in an article, but it is absolutely essential to a book.
Joshua Foer
