Book Quotes
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I have written 5 books that address major figures in our culture: books on Malcolm X, Martin Luther King Jr., Tupac Shakur, Marvin Gaye and Bill Cosby. But even in the books that take up major figures, I hope to provoke conversation, insight and understanding about these personalities by providing new, fresh and vital information and analysis about them.
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Because I have two houses, I invariably get immersed in a book and then discover it's at the other house.
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But a book suggests conversation: one person is speaking to another, and audible sound is, or should be, natural to that exchange. So I read aloud with myself as the audience, and gave voice to another's words.
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I'm the world's worst at reading reviews and then pretending I've read the book.
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It's born of sheer laziness. My signature dishes are salads, hamburgers and popcorn. That's not the kind of stuff that gets you an entry in the distinguished book of culinary records. Being known for great soufflé is one thing but a good hamburger? What would they say? "Yeah, he really knew how to put the cheese on."
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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.
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I jealously guard my research time and I love fully immersing myself in those dusty old books and papers. It's one of the most enjoyable parts of my job.
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On one side you have book burners, Congressional wives and Pat Robertson. On the other side, you have vulgar comedians, foul-mouthed rap groups and Dennis Hopper—all your choices should be so easy.
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I spent so much time in my bedroom. It really was my entire world. I had books up there, my music up there, my record player. Going from my world upstairs out onto the street, I had to pass through this no-man's-land of the living room, you know, and out the front hall.
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It is one thing to write a good sentence, another to write a good book.
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There are perhaps no days of our childhood we lived so fully as those we spent with a favorite book.
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One's head is finite. You pour more and more things into it - surnames, chronologies, affiliations - and it packs them away in its tunnels, and eventually you find that you have a book about something that you publish.
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They eviscerated the book by making it an action movie for young people aged 15 to 25, and it seems that The Hobbit will be the same kind of film.
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In a sense, Open City is a kind of Wunderkammer, one of those little rooms assembled with bric-a-brac by Renaissance scholars. I don't mean it as a term of praise: these cabinets of curiousities contained specific sorts of objects - maps, skulls (as memento mori), works of art, stuffed animals, natural history samples, and books - and Open City actually contains many of the same sort of objects. So, I don't think it's as simple as literary inclusiveness.
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The first time I remember really being excited about a book was The Count of Monte Cristo.
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In this box are all the words I know… Most of them you will never need, some you will use constantly, but with them you may ask all the questions which have never been answered and answer all the questions which have never been asked. All the great books of the past and all the ones yet to come are made with these words. With them there is no obstacle you cannot overcome. All you must learn to do is use them well and in the right places.
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Writing a book, just like building a library, is an act of sheer defiance. It is a declaration that you believe in the persistence of memory.
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We had an open house when we launched the book and 900 people passed through in the first four hours.
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Literary men now routinely tell their readers about their divorces. One literary man who reviews books wrote, in reviewing a study of Ruskin, that he had never read a book by Ruskin but that the study confirmed him in his belief that he didn't want to read a book by Ruskin. This man very often writes about his family life.
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I can only describe it as: the whole experience was imprinted on my body. And when I started to write it, it just came from such a very, In The Body of the Worldvery physical... it just came from my body. I don't know how to explain it better than that. I guess my head was transmitting it. It was a very, very physical experience writing this book.
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I have learned to do more with less, so you don't see the big books anymore.
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You understood me; you helped me understand myself. If reading a book is a naked encounter between two people, I have known you nakedly for years.
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I had never read in public, never given an interview. I was doing it all and trying to produce the next book and raise three young kids and had another child on the way.
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I cannot even picture myself retiring. What would I do? I'll always be doing something, asking somebody questions, even if there weren't a book.
