Book Quotes - Page 358

A book of mine is always a matter of fate. There is something unpredictable about the process of writing, and I cannot prescribe for myself any predetermined course.

The Thieves of Manhattan is a sly and cutting riff on the book-publishing world that is quite funny unless you happen to be an author, in which case the novel will make you consider a more sensible profession-like being a rodeo clown, for example, or a crab-fisherman in the Bering Sea.

Y'see, I get so bored so easily. I like to start with a clean slate each time. Sure, I'll have characters drop in and out of books but the main cast of characters always changes. Maybe I'm wrong but I think if had the same joe detective guy or gal, I wouldn't write them as well; I wouldn't do as good a job.

Everybody's idea of a great book is different, of course. For me it's one that makes my jaw drop on every page, the writing is so original.

I enjoyed doing the gag covers better than the story ones because they were usually simpler. A cover based on an incident in the plot took a great deal of staging to tell a little story that was still part of the book. And it had to make sense on its own.

When I began work on my first book, The River of Doubt, which tells the story of Theodore Roosevelts 1914 descent of an unmapped river in the Amazon rainforest, I thought of it as a tale of adventure, exploration and extraordinary courage.

I have never appreciated a quiet moment with a friend as much, a quiet moment with a book and I think part of that is my obsession with being older and time going faster and it's become increasingly sweeter for me.

My generation of bossy, confident, baby-boom women were something brand new in history. Our energy and assertiveness weren't created by Betty Friedan, unknown before her 1963 book, or by Gloria Steinem, whose political activism, as even the Lifetime profile admitted, did not begin until 1969.

Great women scholars like Jane Harrison and Gisela Richter were produced by the intellectual discipline of the masculine classical tradition, not the wishy-washy sentimentalism of clingy, all-forgiving sisterhood, from which no first-rate book has yet emerged. Every year, feminists provide more and more evidence for the old charge that women can neither think nor write.

And every book, you find, has its own social group--friends of its own it wants to introduce you to, like a party in the library that need never, ever end.

If you eat enough books, you start pooping out words.

Don't be constantly selling and shilling. Figure out how you can help others, tell them stories, and share openly everything you know so that people will recognize you as someone that they can trust, who won't turn them off by constantly trying to sell them something.

We must sometimes get away from the Authorized Version, if for no other reason, simply because it is so beautiful and so solemn. Beauty exalts, but beauty also lulls. Early associations endear, but they also confuse. Through that beautiful solemnity, the transporting or horrifying realities of which the Book tells may come to us blunted and disarmed, and we may only sigh with tranquil veneration when we ought to be burning with shame, or struck dumb with terror, or carried out of ourselves by ravishing hopes and adorations.

One of the most dangerous errors is that civilization is automatically bound to increase and spread. The lesson of history is the opposite; civilization is a rarity, attained with difficulty and easily lost. The normal state of humanity is barbarism, just as the normal surface of the planet is salt water. Land looms large in our imagination and civilization in history books, only because sea and savagery are to us less interesting.

Naturally, since I myself am a writer, I do not wish the ordinary reader to read no modern books. But if he must read only the new or only the old, I would advise him to read the old.

What we want is not more little books about Christianity, but more little books by Christians on other subjects--with their Christianity latent.

He liked books if they were books of information and had pictures of grain elevators or of fat foreign children doing exercises in model schools.

A children's story that can only be enjoyed by children is not a good children's story in the slightest." He also said: "No book is really worth reading at the age of ten which is not equally - and often far more - worth reading at the age of 50 and beyond.

I must be like the princess who felt the pea through seven mattresses; each book is a pea.

My book is very wild. But you know during the period of BATMAN, that there were thousands of Batman and Robin costumes sold and these weren't just for kids.

I simply went down there to catch up with an old mate of mine, who owns the place. He's the one who wrote the book on the place, but no, no movie, just a beer.

That Elvis, man, he is all there is. There ain't no more. Everything starts and ends with him. He wrote the book. But for him, I'd be selling encyclopedias right now. There have been a lotta tough guys. There have been pretenders. And there have been contenders. But there is only one king.

I think so much of our society is geared towards mainstream media and pop culture and so forth. And there's a huge divide between the artist and the fan. And with indie culture that wall is removed. You actually do see the musicians walking around enjoying the show. It's a distinctly different culture and for the 99% of Nirvana fans that caught up with them with Nevermind, my book is gonna give them a whole different take on Kurt [Cobain] and the band.

More books, more racing and more foolishness with cars and motorcycles are in the works.

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