Book Quotes
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I ransack public libraries & find them full of sunk treasure.
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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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I've always believed that everything that is said from authority is either the authority of one's own heart, one's own brain, one's own reading, one's own trust, but not the authority of someone who claims it because they're speaking for God and they know the truth because it's written in a book. That, essentially, is where I come from. In a sense, tolerance is my religion. Reason is my religion.
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Putting lessons in young adult books is very dangerous.
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Americans like fat books and thin women.
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I spent my life in the library reading books.
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I know of no other book that so fully teaches the subjection and degradation of women.
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I always resented books that tried to teach a lesson, where the characters are too good: They don't swear, they tell their mothers everything.
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As the years go by, I find myself experiencing God's extraordinary concern, consideration, healing, and what I call in my books, the divine therapy.
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Happiness is not something that happens to people but something that they make happen.” His research shows that people are happiest in a state he has named “flow.” In a state of flow, you are one with what you are doing. Children know flow well. They call it play. Play is one of the childhood roots of adult happiness. But there are others—four others, to be exact—in the schema I outline in this book.
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I ate them like salad, books were my sandwich for lunch, my tiffin and dinner and midnight munch. I tore out the pages, ate them with salt, doused them with relish, gnawed on the bindings, turned the chapters with my tongue! Books by the dozen, the score and the billion. I carried so many home I was hunchbacked for years. Philosophy, art history, politics, social science, the poem, the essay, the grandiose play, you name 'em, I ate 'em.
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The only other thing which I think is important is: Don't write a book or start a book with the expectation of communicating a message in a very important way.
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There is poetry in fiction. If you cannot see it and feel it when you write, you need to step back and examine what you are doing wrong. If you have not figured out how to write a simple declarative sentence and make it sing with that poetry, you are not yet ready to write an entire book.
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I get angry about stuff, I get very emotionally intense about stuff and that's how I get it out - with books, with the band, on my own onstage, but it's always kind of a wail.
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Choose a book, ... Any book. Bring it here, and I'll show you what else the world can offer.
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More is got from one book on which the thought settles for a definite end in knowledge, than from libraries skimmed over by a wandering eye.
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School was a source of great suffering to me, but once I learned to read, I disappeared into books, where I was a happy visitor to all the worlds that sprang full-blown from the printed page.
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The difference between a novelist and someone who tinkers around with writing is this: novelists finish their books.
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My life has been an open book, really. Everybody knows everything about me.
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A good book is a good book, and there are a lot of different ways to approach writing or reading one.
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What a place for him who intends to pass an examination, to write a book, or who wants the crumples got by crushing together too long with his fellows to be smoothed out of his soul.
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A lot of the books that I grew up reading were pretty brutal, like the Redwall books.
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I spent my entire time reading books and going to the cinema, just to escape.
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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."
