Book Quotes
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I love Toni Morrison and Jeanette Winterson. 'The Passion' is my favourite book.
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We didn't sleep last week - we literally didn't sleep - because we've been so busy with the book.
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Generally a chef's book is like a calling card or a portfolio to display their personal work.
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I was starstruck and completely confused; making a film of this story hadn't even occurred to me, and I hadn't written a single line of the book yet. I had no idea how this man knew anything about my book proposal.
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Making a book is a craft, like making a clock; it needs more than native wit to be an author.
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What made it possible for me to exercise freedom of choice also made it impossible to know the future. Conversely, now that I know the future, I would never act contrary to that future. ... Those who've read the Book of Ages never admit to it.
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You should not actually stay in bed for very long awake, because your brain is this remarkably associative device, and it quickly learns that the bed is about being awake. So you should go to another room - a room that's dim. Just read a book - no screens, no phones - and, only when you're sleepy, return to the bed.
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The art of the novelist is not unrelated to the illness of multiple personality disorder. It's a much milder form. But the better the book, the nearer to the padded cell you are.
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What has influenced my life more than any other single thing has been my stammer. Had I not stammered I would probably... have gone to Cambridge as my brothers did, perhaps have become a don and every now and then published a dreary book about French literature.
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I used to sketch - that's the way I thought out loud. Then they made a book of my sketches, and I got self-conscious, so now I don't do it much.
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I write a lot about my experiences and the people I meet. Ive got a lot of material. But a book about me? It seems sort of odd.
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I don't start with a list of historical scenes that I want to include in the book. At a certain point, the narrative totally takes over, and everything that I include I can only incorporate if it answers to the internal terms of the novel.
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What do I want in a good fantasy book? Court politics and social interactions based around houses and cities. Powerful women and devious men. Drama and action with emotional ramifications. Frocks. Kissing. Swords. An intense impression of history in the world-building.
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I translated an Emile Zola book, 'The Belly of Paris,' because I didn't find an existing translation that captured his sense of humor. Humor is the first victim of translation.
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A lot of recent comic book adaptations have gone two ways: either they're striving for some kind of realism, like 'Iron Man' or 'The Dark Knight,' or they're very stylised and gritty, like 'Sin City' and '300.'
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There's a market for mysteries for adults. That feeling of opening a book and delving inside and not coming out until you've closed the book.
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In camp was found a book, the first of the kind I had ever seen, in which I was made a great hero, slaying Indians by the hundreds.
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A good book is never exhausted. It goes on whispering to you from the wall.
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I have children, and this notion - that there might be a single book that introduces children to literature - terrifies me. But you could do worse than Mary Norton's 'The Borrowers.' I loved it as a kid, and my kids love it, too.
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The only pressure I feel is to write good books. And to not replicate the previous book. Whether you have a thousand readers or a million readers it doesn't change the pressure. I never feel tempted to give the reader what I think the reader wants.
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When someone says 'comic book movies', what they inevitably mean is a summer superhero blockbuster, with heavily-muscled and tightly-gluted men (plus the occasional token woman) in tight-fitting costumes punching the living daylights out of one another for two hours.
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I think that every so-called history book and film biography should be prefaced by the statement that what follows is the author's rendition of events and circumstances.
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I remember thinking that people were crazy for reading the same book more than once, but I now have a new-found appreciation for the re-discovery of literature. The lessons we learned from books in the school curriculum are reinvented and updated when we read as adults.
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No matter how beautiful and loved a cover may be, the jury on it remains uncommitted until the book has been in the world for a while. Perhaps bookstore buyers will be indifferent. Perhaps it will be lost on store shelves. Perhaps there's another book or two out there using the same or a similar photo.
