Book Quotes
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Characters are the key to a good book. It took me several novels to comprehend that.
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When Bernard Leach wrote his book, he wrote about the fact that even when pots are made in a series, there is a personality to each pot and that the person who made it reflects their personality into the clay.
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Garrett," said Stendahl, "do you know why I've done this to you? Because you burned Mr. Poe's books without really reading them. You took other people's advice that they needed burning. Otherwise you'd have realized what I was going to do to you when we came down here a moment ago. Ignorance is fatal, Mr. Garrett.
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A lot of my close friends had tolerantly washed their hands of the whole idea of me writing a book. They had said to themselves, "I don't know what he's doing."
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I feel I've got 10 books in me.
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Rule books tell people what to do. Frameworks guide people how to act. Rule books insist on discipline. Frameworks allow for creativity.
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With thought, patience, and discrimination, book passion becomes the signature of a person's character.
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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.
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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 write books for teenagers because I vividly remember what it felt like to be a teen facing everyday and epic dangers. I don't write to protect them. It's far too late for that. I write to give them weapons-in the form of words and ideas-that will help them fight their monsters. I write in blood because I remember what it felt like to bleed.
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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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I'm incredibly flattered when people tell me that my books helped them through high school. Because of my own experience, the thought that something I wrote might help someone who felt the way I did when I was a teen...that's huge. It awes me.
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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'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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I don't really read books. Wish I did.
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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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You don't have to burn books to destroy a culture. Just get people to stop reading them.
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I have written 13 books, full of my ideas about a variety of issues - from black women, to hip-hop culture, to the civil rights struggle. Even when I address such figures as Tupac Shakur and Bill Cosby, my ideas are quite evident.
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My process is surprisingly straightforward. I find myself with little to do over a stretch of time and I say, "I should write children's books today." Then I sit down and write a children's book, and if it takes more than, realistically, three hours, I feel like I've done something wrong.
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I've written a lot of other books and this book Tears we cannot stop was different. I couldn't just say what I wanted to say in the same style that I said it in those other books. I felt compelled to preach.
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What one knows best is ... what one has learned not from books but as a result of books, through the reflections to which they have given rise.
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There is no future for e-books, because they are not books. E-books smell like burned fuel.
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The civil liberties types who are fighting this issue have to fight it, owing to the nature of the laws, as a matter of freedom of speech and stifling of free expression and so on. But we know what's really involved, dirty books are fun. That's all there is to it. But you can't get up in a court and say that.
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The great revelation of the quantum theory was that features of discreteness were discovered in the Book of Nature, in a context in which anything other than continuity seemed to be absurd according to the views held until then.
