Book Quotes
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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 don't really read books. Wish I did.
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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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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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We can all learn from every text. Reading the work that disgusts you can only strengthen your core beliefs. I could teach a semester-long course based only on reading the local telephone book. All stories can be taught in valuable ways.
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I don't really read children's books or deal with children's books, so I don't have any relationship with them other than my own.
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If you're going to undertake any project, like a book, you have to show up to give.
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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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Americans like fat books and thin women.
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There are good books and there are bad books, period, that's the distinction.
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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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If one reads enough books one has a fighting chance. Or better, one's chances of survival increase with each book one reads.
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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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It would have been a hard year if I'd spent it berating myself for not working on the book.
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So there you have it, a lifetime of first smelling the books, they all smell wonderful, reading the books, loving the books, and remembering the books.
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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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My first book was the book that changed my life.
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Ive written a book on gangs, taught a course on gangs at Occidental.
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With thought, patience, and discrimination, book passion becomes the signature of a person's character.
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Do you ever read any of the books you burn?" He laughed. "That's against the law!" "Oh. Of course.
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I read a lot of obscure books and it is nice to open a book.
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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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The idea of the writer who writes nineteen novels, with various ups and downs and levels of experimentation, isn't around so much now. There's a focus, I think, on fewer books, with more pressure on each book to succeed. With that there comes, I think, a certain pressure towards shapeliness in fiction. Towards neatness. And I think writers feel that, and it can effect how they write.
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The difference between a novelist and someone who tinkers around with writing is this: novelists finish their books.
