Book Quotes - Page 425

I have spent 20 years writing these books. Had I wanted to say men are beasts and scream, that takes 30 seconds.

I was really surprised at the success of 'House of Sand and Fog,' because it is so awfully dark. Believe it or not, when writing it, I never had the word 'tragedy' in my head - I wasn't trying to write a dark book at all.

I read a lot when I'm travelling and always have a couple of books on the go.

I read a book a day when I was a kid. My family was not literary; we did not have any books in the house.

Michael Ondaatje’s work taught me how to be at home in fragments, and how to think about a big story in carefully curated vignettes. All his books were odd, all of them ‘unfinished’ the way Chopin’s Études are unfinished: no wasted gestures, no unnecessary notes.

A book which the Mohammedans foolishly believe to have been written by divine inspiration, but which Christians know to be a wicked imposture, contradictory to the Holy Scriptures.

I'm not a big hijinker. I'm a big sit-in-my-chair-and-read-a-book-er.

People often say to me now, "Your work changed my life." I'm sure that's an exaggeration, but they say it had a big effect on them and enabled them to change. I'm not sure I believe that a book will cause someone to change.

In my books, my idea is always to explore social context and social forces.

Love likes to extend itself. If you receive it in a book - or however you get it - then your duty is to extend it beyond.

It is one of the strongest bonds, I think, that can spring up between people: sharing a passion for certain books and their authors.

It was at this time that she entirely gave up on reading. The covers of books looked like coffins to her, either shabby or ornate, and what was inside them might as well have been dust.

They were written on cheap blue notebooks bought by poor women. I'm interested in folk tales in the way that medicine and magic in women's stories are all kind of combined.

Whenever you do something that's original, not based on a comic book or a novel or an old movie or a franchise, you definitely learn a lot and for I think it was very gratifying to see the people embrace the world.

My books, at any rate, deserved to be burned.

Reviewing books is all about coziness. It is all of it a kind of caucus race. Women review women, Jewish writers review and praise Jewish writers, blacks review blacks, etc.

I grew up on Stephen King, reading the books. I love the small town, 1950s feel to it, that nostalgia, and that old America. What happens when something weird starts happening to all these people, something other-worldly, something demonic?

Every now and then, you find a book that feels like it was keyed to your DNA.

Strip it all down to essentials and draw the hell out of what's left.

We dare them to apply a principle for 40 days to their kids. They don't have to be 40 consecutive days...Already people that even tested the book for us had amazing responses from their kids.

Whatever solidarity I have established with other writers individually, it is usually organized around books. We connected as readers, as it were, not writers.

The most powerful book in the world at the beginning of the twentieth century is the check-book.

Deprived of their newspapers or a novel, reading-addicts will fall back onto cookery books, on the literature which is wrapped around bottles of patent medicine, on those instructions for keeping the contents crisp which are printed on the outside of boxes of breakfast cereals. On anything.

The listeners who buy books after a reading multiply that reading; the author who realizes that he or she may be writing on a blank page but is at least not speaking to a blank wall may be encouraged by the experience, and write more.

Readers, censors know, are defined by the books they read.