Book Quotes - Page 364

Blake has always been a favorite, the lyrics, not so much the prophetic books, but I suppose Yeats influenced me more as a young poet, and the American, Robert Frost.

I keep feeling that there isn't one poem being written by any one of us - or a book or anything like that. The whole life of us writers, the whole product I guess I mean, is the one long poem - a community effort if you will. It's all the same poem. It doesn't belong to any one writer - it's God's poem perhaps. Or God's people's poem.

Obsession led me to write. It's been that way with every book I've ever written. I become completely consumed by a theme, by characters, by a desire to meet a challenge.

My heart right now is totally connected to a book called The Servant of the Bones, which is not in any way connected with vampires or witches. It's about a new hero, a ghost, who really doesn't particularly like the job that he's been given. I'm in love with this hero and in love with his dilemma.

First-person narrators is the way I know how to write a book with the greatest power and chance of artistic success.

And books, they offer one hope -- that a whole universe might open up from between the covers, and falling into that universe, one is saved.

E-books are great for instant gratification - you see a review somewhere of a book that interests you, and you can start reading it five minutes later.

Two things put me in the spirit to give. One is that I have come to think of everyone with whom I come into contast as a patient in the emergency room. I see a lot of gaping wounds and dazed expressions. Or, as Marianne Moore put it, "The world's an orphan's home." And this feels more true than almost anything else I know. But so many of us can be soothed by writing: think of how many times you have opened a book, read one line, and said, "Yes!" And I want to give people that feeling, too, of connection, communication.

Books help us understand who we are and how we are to behave. They show us what community and friendship mean; they show us how to live and die.

When you make friends with fear, it can’t rule you.

I used to tell my writing students that they must write the books they wished they could come upon - because then the books they hungered and thirsted for would exist.

I felt that one of the things God impressed on me was that I needed to start a nonprofit corporation, so that any money that came my way, whether it was an honorarium, a book sale or a gift, would go into a nonprofit ministry.

Ordinary people simply don't know what books mean to us, shut up here. Reading, learning, and the radio are our amusements.

I have never been able to resist a book about books.

I’m really lucky with the people around me. They know me, so they don’t confuse the issues really. They know what a book is and they know who I am and they know the difference between the two.

You write a book and you finish the book. That's your job done, right? You win the Booker and you have a whole new job. You have to be the thing, right? So instead of writing the story, you somehow are the story. And that I found that sort of terrible.

The way to write a book is to actually write a book. A pen is useful, typing is also good. Keep putting words on the page.

What would it be like to live in a library of melted books. With sentences streaming over the floor and all the punctuation settled to the bottom as a residue. It would be confusing. Unforgivable. A great adventure.

Food binds us to our roots as strongly as any song or poem. Many of us have learned more about our ancestors in the kitchen than we ever will from a book.

Creating a book and creating a collection involve a lot of editing.

You just pray that something is going to hit you like lightning. Like a movie, a book, or a photograph, a painting, something that you can riff on it and learn more about it and explore it, and just go on a journey with it. So lots of times when I choose a theme, I'll also incorporate other things that I'm doing at that period.

If God had meant Harvard professors to appear in People magazine, She wouldn't have invented The New York Review of Books.

Well, I'd like to think I am, and I'd also like to think that we're all having a lot more fun getting older than we pretend. It was interesting to me when I first started working on this book that I'd mentioned that I was writing a memoir about aging and everybody would moan and groan and carry on.

Reading has always been my home, my sustenance, my great invincible companion. "Book love," Trollope called it. "It will make your hours pleasant to you as long as you live." Yet of all the many things in which we recognize some universal comfort...reading seems to be the one in which the comfort is most undersung.

In books I have traveled, not only to other worlds but into my own. I learned who I was and who I wanted to be, what I might aspire to, and what I might dare to dream about my world and myself.