Book Quotes - Page 399

The moment when the finished book or, better yet, a tightly packed carton of finished books arrives on my doorstep is the moment of truth, of culmination; its bliss lasts as much as five minutes, until the first typographical error or production flaw is noticed.

Smaller than a breadbox, bigger than a TV remote, the average book fits into the human hand with a seductive nestling, a kiss of texture, whether of cover cloth, glazed jacket, or flexible paperback.

I think books should have secrets, like people do.

I don't write as much now as I used to, but I write. The lines still come, maybe periodically, and I'll go through these little bursts of time where I write a lot of things then a long period of time where maybe I don't write anything. Or these lines will come into my head and I'll write 'em down in a little book, just little sets of lines, but I won't try to make stories or poems out of them. I'm doing a lot of that now, just the lines.

Christopher Carson, whose renown as Kit Carson has reached almost every ear in the country was born in Madison county, Kentucky, on the 24th of December, 1809.

Just like heaven. Ever’body wants a little piece of lan’. I read plenty of books out here. Nobody never gets to heaven, and nobody gets no land. It’s just in their head. They’re all the time talkin’ about it, but it’s jus’ in their head.

They must be real people. And this means that every word in every line of speech must be accurate and full of some kind of meaning which stretches not only forward in the book but stems from before in the book.

I live on the other side of Copernicus and Galileo; I can no longer conceive of God as sort of above the sky, looking down and keeping record books.

Pat Robertson said the feminist movement was just a bunch of lesbians who wanted to leave their husbands and kill their children. I quoted him in my book. It's a fantastic statement.

In my books I might hold the mirror to my own face. If others would like to borrow the mirror, they're welcome. The books aren't there to accuse others - merely to raise issues and keep the debates alive.

A grain of real knowledge, of genuine controllable conviction, will outweigh a bushel of adroitness; and to produce persuasion there is one golden principle of rhetoric not put down in the books-to understand what you are talking about.

At one level, the message of the book of Ruth is that the life of the godly is not a straight line to glory, but they do get there.

When you read the sacred Scriptures, or any other book, never think how you read, but what you read.

I don't believe in children's books. I think after you've read Kidnapped, Treasure Island, and Huckleberry Finn, you're ready for anything.

God is thy law, thou mine.

Pleas'd me, long choosing and beginning late.

Morally and philosophically I find myself in agreement with virtually the whole of it: and not only in agreement with it, but in deeply moved agreement.

Far more seemly to have thy study full of books, than thy purse full of money.

Books seem to me to be pestilent things, and infect all that trade in them...with something very perverse and brutal. Printers, binders, sellers, and others that make a trade and gain out of them have universally so odd a turn and corruption of mind that they have a way of dealing peculiar to themselves, and not conformed to the good of society and that general fairness which cements mankind.

Let not men think there is no truth, but in the sciences that they study, or the books that they read.

I heard of Martin Luther King Jr. when I was 15 years old. I heard of Rosa Parks. And I met Dr. King in 1958 at the age of 18. I met Rosa Parks ... But to pick up a fun comic book - some people used to call them "funny books" - to pick this little book up, it sold for 10 cents, 12 pages or 14 pages? 14 pages I digested. And it inspired me. And I said to myself, "If the people of Montgomery can do this, maybe I can do something. Maybe I can make a contribution."

Each my book feels like my last book. And then I think, like a dedicated alcoholic, that one more won't do me any harm.

Thank heaven, though, one of the few mistakes I haven't made is to talk about the unwritten book.

Samuel Beckett is the person that I read the most of - certainly the person whose books I own the most of. Probably 800 or 900, maybe 1,000 books of just Samuel Beckett. By him, about him, in different languages, etc. etc. Notebooks of his, letters of his that I own, personal letters - not to me, but I bought a bunch of correspondence of his. I love his humor, and I'm always blown away by his syntax and his ideas. So I keep reading those.

A prose writer never sees a reader walk out of a book; for a playwright, it's another matter. An audience is an invaluable education. In my experience, theatre artists don't know what they've made until they've made it.