Book Quotes
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Those of us who are writers and have to perform to communities that aren't used to coming to book events, I would recommend taking some theater.
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You don't have to burn books to destroy a culture. Just get people to stop reading them.
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I just think, as writers, especially with a book that takes years to write, you sort of wake up every morning hoping and praying that you can make it work for the day.
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The First Lady asked me how many people passed through the White House on tours. When I told her thousands did, she said they should sell something to the tourists and use the profits to help redecorate the White House. She decided to make a small book. It cost 42 cents and sold for a dollar. Over the years it has brought in $42 million.
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I try to create new characters in each book I write. That's what makes writing fun and interesting for me.
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Real life is physical. Give me books instead. Give me the invisibility of the contents of books, the thoughts, the ideas, the images. Let me become part of a book. . . . an intertextual being: a book cyborg, or, considering that books aren't cybernetic, perhaps a bibliorg.
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By the end of the time I'm writing a book, I'm tearing my hair out and I want to go do stand-up. And then I want to do something else. I don't know why it is true with me that I can't just be satisfied doing the one thing, but I'm constantly flitting from one thing to another.
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What a big book, captain, might be made with all that is known!" "And what a much bigger book still with all that is not known!
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There's a great book about John Kennedy and his relationship to civil rights called 'The Bystander.' The title alone suggests that he did as little as possible, any minimal critical effort, to really facilitate civil rights in the White House.
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I don't see how it could possibly be made into a movie unless the entire book was scrapped and Shirley Temple cast as 'Bonnie,' Mae West as 'Belle,' and Stepin Fetchit as 'Uncle Peter.'
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I feel I've got 10 books in me.
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There's no book that absolutely everyone loves.
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With thought, patience, and discrimination, book passion becomes the signature of a person's character.
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This is a book about getting naked—not physically, but spiritually. It’s about stripping away the symbols and status of public religion—the Sunday-dress version people often call “organized religion.” And it’s about attending to the well-being of the soul clothed only in naked human skin.
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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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Which is why I am writing this book. To think. To understand. It just happens to be the way I'm made. I have to write things down to feel I fully comprehend them.
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I went through every phone book in Africa, and I didn't find one god damned Pryor!
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It would have been a hard year if I'd spent it berating myself for not working on the book.
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I've often said to myself, "Thank God I can write, 'cause this is hilarious." I actually wanted to go into all that more in the book, but my editor thought it was too crazy.
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It's so much better to hand over a finished book than having all these people waiting.
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A book is judged, not by its reference to life, but by its reference to other books.
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Characters are the key to a good book. It took me several novels to comprehend that.
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Ive written a book on gangs, taught a course on gangs at Occidental.
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No matter how many times people say it - 'Oh, I'm just writing this for myself' 'Oh, I'm just doing this for myself' - nobody's doing it for themselves! You're doing it for an audience. So whether I'm performing or writing a book or playing music, it's definitely to be put out there and to be received in some way, definitely.
