Book Quotes - Page 304

I maintain an ongoing survey of Internet Publishing and self publishing, so that it is now possible for any writer with a book to get it published at nominal cost or free, and to have it on sale at booksellers like Amazon.com.

As for collaboration - I have done a lot, 26 books, and found publishers increasingly resistive to them. It's not that the books are bad; editors won't even read them.

There is not less wit nor invention in applying rightly a thought one finds in a book, than in being the first author of that thought. Cardinal du Perron has been heard to say that the happy application of a verse of Virgil has deserved a talent.

Memorizing, guessing, looking at pictures, predicting, substituting, and skipping, are not reading; they are very bad habits.

Anyone of any age, any race, any background, any education - if they write an interesting enough book - can become a published author. What it takes is imagination, the ability to put words on a paper in an interesting, perhaps even unique way, the fortitude to rewrite, rewrite, rewrite, and polish, edit, polish, edit until the story sort of sings. I think everyone has a story inside him, but only a few have the persistence and, of course, the interest, to write it down and see it through.

Catch-22 is the greatest satirical work in English since Erewhon...remarkable... This is a book that I could wish everyone to read. It is a book which should help us feel more clearly

I would be wonderful with a 100-year moratorium on literature talk, if you shut down all literature departments, close the book reviews, ban the critics. The readers should be alone with the books, and if anyone dared to say anything about them, they would be shot or imprisoned right on the spot. Yes, shot. A 100-year moratorium on insufferable literary talk. You should let people fight with the books on their own and rediscover what they are and what they are not. Anything other than this talk.

I used to be very fascinated by Victorian stuff, and my best known books, the Mortal Engines series, have a sort of retro, Victorian vibe, despite being set in the far future.

I have stolen ideas from every book I have ever read.

There are some themes, some subjects, too large for adult fiction; they can only be dealt with adequately in a children's book.

Autobiography is an unrivaled vehicle for telling the truth about other people.

Why did I like simpler songs? Just times change. This is one of the repeated things I hear: even though people will read different kinds of books, they don't read Lord of the Rings when they're 30 even though they did at 15.

Books come at my call and return when I desire them; they are never out of humor and they answer all my questions with readiness. Some present in review before me the events of past ages; others reveal to me the secrets of Nature. These teach me how to live, and those how to die; these dispel my melancholy by their mirth, and amuse me by their sallies of wit. Some there are who prepare my soul to suffer everything, to desire nothing, and to become thoroughly acquainted with itself. In a word, they open the door to all the arts and sciences.

A respect for authority is the basis for most medical education. Students may become so used to memorising that they become prey to the illusion that the reason for learning to parrot lectures and textbooks is that they are the 'truth'.

These days, there are a great many books about childhood trauma and its effects, but at the time all the experts agreed that one should forget about it as quickly as possible and pick up where you left off.

When, in the third book, we do learn the identity of the Blue Rose murderer, the information comes in a muted, nearly off-hand manner, and the man has died long before.

There were a lot of adventure books for boys, historical novels by Kenneth Roberts, and whatever mystery novels the alarmed librarian imagined might not corrupt an eager but innocent youth.

If we can put a man on the moon and sequence the human genome, we should be able to devise something close to a universal digital public library.

After I discovered my degree in photojournalism would only get me a job in a camera store, I taught myself lighting. I read tons of magazines and books and studied the photos trying to figure out how they were done. I bought some flash equipment and played around until I figured out how to make a subject look as I envisioned it should look.

Whenever something good happens, write it down. Buy a special notebook . . . and use it to list all the good in your life.

My eye is fixed not on the ending of the book but on the feeling of that ending.

I travel abroad constantly on book promotion and research, and the Internet is invaluable to me for accessing U.K. news in places such as America, which most of the time hasn't heard of England.

A definition is death. A definition is the answer to which you must look up the question in the back of your book.

Great children's books are wisdom dipped in words and art.

I went to work in 1962, and by '64 I was writing all the time, every night and every weekend. It didn't occur to me that, having read nothing and knowing nothing, I was in no position to write a book.