Book Quotes - Page 368

My main point about films is that I don't like the adaptation process, and I particularly don't like the modern way of comic book-film adaptations, where, essentially, the central characters are just franchises that can be worked endlessly to no apparent point.

I've never watched any of the adaptations of my books. I've never wanted to, and there's absolutely no chance of me doing so in the future.

Every reader gets something different from a book and every reader, in a sense, completes it in a different way.

We used to say that inside Cecil Beaton there was another Cecil Beaton sending out lots of little Cecils into the world. One did the sets, another did the costumes. A third took the photographs. Another put the sketches in an exhibition, then into magazines, then in a book.

I have a bad tendency to get rapidly bored with my own material, so rewriting is hard for me. I mean, I already know the story and would rather read something new.

Definition of a classic: a book everyone is assumed to have read and often thinks they have.

We are sensitized by the books we read. And the more books we read, and the deeper their lessons sink into us, the more pairs of glasses we have. And those glasses enable us to see things we would have otherwise missed.

I'm crushed by the responsibility of writing a satirical book.

Adaptation is always the same process for me, which is some version of throwing the book at the wall and seeing what pages fall out. It is trying to imagine, remember the story, read it, put it down, and then write sort of an outline without the book in front of you with some hope that what you like about it will be filtered and distilled out through your memory and then that will be similar to what other people like about it.

You know, it's about getting out there and having a good time. Not about worrying - all these young books for women are like I'm 29 with a closet full of Prada shoes and I can't get a date. Come on.

Fame, money and the size of the market are not very important to me. What is, is writing a book that is worth doing and then publishing it. I don't write books for entertainment, for people to pass the time then throw away.

When we had to do book reports, I would pick a book that no one read and just make it up and turn that in. I got praised for my imagination.

I am not one of the new media experts working all the time with my computers and the PowerPoint's and things of that sort. So, I'm an old fashioned still in this regard but these are the moment where I really can be creative, if I am, to be left alone with just a book and piece of paper and to be thinking.

You know, I've been thinking: all the women in the books you like -- Sartre and Camus and all that -- they don't really exist. Not as people. They're only there to wait for the men. To love them and be loved back or not -- mostly not; to be beaten up or killed; to appear as a face on the wall of Meurseault's cell--

The perfectly natural thing to do with an unreadable book is to give it away; and the publication, for more than a quarter of a century, of volumes which fulfilled this one purpose and no other is a pleasant proof, if proof were needed, of the business principles which underlay the enlightened activity of publishers.

I've always believed in writing without a collaborator, because where two people are writing the same book, each believes he gets all the worry and only half the royalties.

You'll see all other mortal sinners, the ones who flout the honor owed to gods or guests, or loving parents--you'll see them get the justice they deserve. For Hades holds men mightily to a strict accounting down below the earth; he sees all things, inscribes them within the book of his remembering.

I can easily do without people (there are days when I could easily do without myself), and ... in the country of books where I dwell, the dead can count entirely as much as the living.

I wasn't really a big comic book guy, growing up. I watched cartoons, but the choices were a whole heck of a lot slimmer.

What I think is interesting is that the more you do, you have to invent a book of rules of what you can do and what you can't do. And the very real danger is that if your book of rules becomes a book of cliches.

Always, with any movie that I do, I have a book of ideas that I've heard, or seen, or whatever, and I always try to incorporate it in the film.

When I came back to Washington to be The Times' chief congressional correspondent in 1991, I was looking for a book subject, and Ted Kennedy stood out for two reasons.

So you're the little woman who wrote the book that made this great war!

If you wish to be a lawyer, attach no consequence to the place you are in, or the person you are with; but get books, sit down anywhere, and go to reading for yourself. That will make a lawyer of you quicker than any other way.

In regard to this Great Book, I have but to say, it is the best gift God has given to man.