Book Quotes
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When I was a child, eight or ten years old, I made a solemn promise to God that, when I grew up, I would write him a hymn for the prayer-book. The vow has never been fulfilled. But I have painted a large number of pictures, and there must be more than thirty religious ones. I wonder if they will do instead.
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It's funny that I got to do 'On the Road' because the thing that had the biggest impact on me growing up was reading books. I was very inspired by the book and this spirit of Dean Moriarty and how envious we all are of somebody who can be that carefree.
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No one wants to read an apologetic book.
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The first book that they gave me was Jeannie, a young teenager. I went on with her maybe ten books.
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I get annoyed with movies or books, songs or records that deliberately try to make you feel a certain way.
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You know what enormous harm we have been dealt by the publication of Pasternak’s Doctor Zhivago. Everybody who has read your book, everybody who has seen the reviews are convinced that the potential harm from your 'Life and Fate' would be far more dangerous than that of Doctor Zhivago.
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The Marvel universe is a deep, weird, woolly place, and getting to expose strange corners of it is part of the fun of 'She-Hulk.' Honestly, it's part of the fun of any Marvel book.
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Of his new book, Don says: “It might be the greatest book ever written. I don’t think anybody is going to read a book again after they read my new one. I think God is proud of me. I am going to make a killing off this thing and I’m going to use the money to go to space.
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Putting out a book is absolutely a lesson in vulnerability because it doesn't matter how much of an audience you have. Some people who have giant audiences can't sell books because those audiences don't feel like they need to give them their money.
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I hate to think of a day where a compelling book or a compelling authorial voice would be lost simply because that person doesn't have a Web site. But I think that, to use the Internet in a positive way, to turn people on to reading, is something that authors shouldn't really shy away from necessarily.
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What did people do prior to cell phones? Read a book? If I'm stuck in a car, and I don't have my phone, I'm like, 'What am I doing?' Car rides used to be one of my favorite things.
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A Trump presidency feels as if we've crawled between the covers of a really crummy book.
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In seventh grade, with some vague sense that I wanted to be a writer, I crouched in the junior high school library stacks to see where my novels would eventually be filed. It was right after someone named Kurt Vonnegut, Jr. So I grabbed a Vonnegut book, 'Breakfast of Champions' and immediately fell in love.
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In the spring of 1988, my wife, Joan Didion, and I were approached about writing a screenplay based on a book by Alanna Nash called 'Golden Girl,' a biography of the late network correspondent and anchorwoman Jessica Savitch.
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At any comic book convention in America, you'll find aspiring cartoonists with dozens of complex plot ideas and armloads of character sketches. Only a small percentage ever move from those ideas and sketches to a finished book.
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Until I was 16, I read nothing but science fiction. I loved William Gibson and I still do. But my favourite book when I was growing up, for a long time, was 'Snow Crash' by Neal Stephenson, which I must have read about a dozen times when I was a teenager.
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People always ask what a book is about, as if it has to be about something. I don't want to write books that lend themselves to that sort of description. My books are more a kind of breaking-down.
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I began to ask two questions while I was reading a book that excited me: not only what was going to happen next, but how is this done? How is it that these words on the page make me feel the way I'm feeling? This is the line of inquiry that I think happens in a child's mind, without him even knowing he has aspirations as a writer.
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Every time I had a book come out, I'm like, 'Is it going to be number one?'
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I try to do as much as possible for every character. Some of them, it is easier to do the research because you have either real examples that you work with, maybe some specific person that inspires you in that case, or the performances from other people, or the characters, or a character from a book.
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I don't want to turn 50 and say, 'Gosh, I wish I'd lived in that part of the world for a time. I wish I'd read that book by Faulkner.' I want time to delve back into Thoreau and Kafka.
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We need to write books that publicists and marketers and booksellers and book club leaders and librarians and readers can get excited about. That have something about them that makes them stand out. That makes them shine.
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I don't care if the audience is 600 Saul Bellows; I'm going to knock them dead with a comedy routine. I'm out there as a missionary for literature because, if people laugh and enjoy themselves, they might actually do something as bizarre as reading the book.
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The Book of Mormon is a second witness of Jesus Christ and a manifestation of the truthfulness of the Prophet Joseph Smith. I love the Prophet Joseph. I love President Gordon B. Hinckley, who is the prophet of God and holds all the keys of the kingdom at this time, keys which prophets have held in uninterrupted succession since Joseph Smith.
