Books Quotes
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On the bottom shelf M. kept the books from his childhood days: Pushkin, Lermontov, Gogol, the Iliad - they are described in The Noise of Time and happened to have been saved by M.'s father. Most of them later perished in Kalinin when I was fleeing from the Germans. The way we have scurried to and fro in the twentieth century, trapped between Hitler and Stalin!
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We all love to hear a good story. We save our stories in books. We save our books in libraries. Libraries are the storyhouses full of all those stories and secrets.
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Phrase books seem to be a universal and eternal source of hilarity and I think I know why. Their authors go mad in the course of compiling them.
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I like each of my books to be different. Once I've done something I like to move on and push myself to learn new things and expand the limits of poetic form.
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It didn't occur to me that my books would be widely read at all, and that enabled me to write anything I wanted to. And even once I realized that they were being read, I still wrote as if I were writing in secret. That's how one has to write anyway--in secret.
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I do recall how I got the ideas for some of my books. Many of them are a result of doodling.
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As I stepped onto the gloomy landing a word formed in my mind: two syllables, starts with a V and rhymes with dire. I froze in place. Nightingale said that everything was true, after a fashion, and that had to include vampires, didn’t it? I doubted they were anything like they were in books and on TV, and one thing was for certain — they absolutely weren’t going to sparkle in the sunlight.
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My dad is a retired Shakespeare professor, my mother a retired classicist. Suffice to say I grew up in a house full of books, where reading was encouraged if not required.
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Rooms in one of those spacious old houses with the large windows facing the sun, and plenty of books—if I were that abstracted but happy form of reptile called a bookworm, which I believed I am prevented from being only by my sex, the genus, I am told, being persistently male, I would take care to spend at least one of my life’s winters in Putbus. How divinely quiet it would be. What a place for him who intends to pass an examination, to write a book, or who wants the crumples got by crushing together too long with his fellows to be smoothed out of his soul.
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It drives me crazy to do readings of my books, because if I read anything I've written in the past, I'd like to almost rewrite everything. If I could, I'd completely rewrite Fargo Rock City, and every sentence would be just slightly different. In all likelihood, most of them wouldn't be any better. Some of them would just be changed back to whatever form they used to be, before I second-guessed myself the first time.
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Not a single one of the men who were close to me has ever had a direction-giving influence on my inclinations, strivings, or my world-view. On the contrary, most of the time I was the guiding spirit. I acquired my view of life, my political line from life itself, and in uninterrupted study from books.
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Books! I dunno if I ever told you this, but books are the greatest gift one person can give another.
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In one of my earlier books, Misquoting Jesus, I discuss the fact that we do not have the original copy of Luke, or Mark, or Paul’s writings, or any of the early Christian texts that make up the New Testament.
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Books are not like people. Books are safe.
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When I was just writing books and giving lectures, if people disagreed, they just didn't buy your book or attend your lectures. But, if you're leading a congregation, people feel they have the right to tell you what you should or shouldn't talk about. And that hasn't always been easy for me.
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As a rule I had a distaste for any reading beyond my school books.
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I remember one letter from a girl in a midwestern town who read one of my books and thought she had discovered it- that no one had ever read it or knew about it. Then one day in her local library she found cards for one or two of my other books. They were full of names- the books were borrowed all the time. She resented this a bit and then walked around the town looking in everybody's face and wondering if they were the ones who were reading my books. That is someone I write for.
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T.S. Eliot's influence was enormous on my generation. Much more than Ezra Pound. I actually had to put T.S. Eliot books out of the house because my poetry was so influenced. Everything I wrote sounded like Eliot.
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Never can a room look comfortable without books ... Books ought to be scattered all over the house, even in the passages, in the bedroom, les livres du chevet, everywhere.
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After all, it's the librarian's sworn purpose to bring books together with their one true reader.
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But what I've also really liked about it is that it not only has Marvel set about... if they just were slavishly trying to bring the comic books to life, literally, I don't the movies would work, because it's different to see something on screen in three dimensions with actors, and they kind of, I believe, are constantly trying to find a way to absolutely respect the source material and at the same time, transform it into something that works and that you believe on screen.
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I've done everything I've wanted to do. I have three children, I have grandchildren, I have books, I did movies, I've directed movies, I've done almost everything I've wanted to do.
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How can anyone become a thinker unless he spends at least a third of every day away from passions, people, and books?
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These books ain't window dressing. I think Machiavelli's the most sophisticated writer outside of Shakespeare. Way ahead of his time. Such a manipulative person. Everything he accomplished he did by kissin' ass.
