Book Quotes - Page 548

It's hard for me to measure them, or to assess my books because I'm so close to them.

I suppose I could collect my books and get on back to school, or steal my Daddy's cue and make a living out of playing pool.

A reckoning is coming on the state of the internet journalism, because right now, the way it's set up, there is so much room for libel to squeak through that you're going to see...they're going to rewrite the rule book on journalism very soon. They have to, because the bloggers are getting away with so much rumor-mongering about public officials and even private figures because they don't have editors and they don't have fact checkers and they don't have lawyers. There is going to be a price to pay somewhere down the line.

I don't really have the gift of the sustained narrative that you need to write a book. I've tried a couple of times, and it just doesn't work. But I get some good passages, so what I'm going to do is just take sections out of them.

I don't advocate Stalinist monolithic state structures any more than I advocate capitalistic monoliths. Unfortunately, human society tends to the monolithic, whether you go to the left or right, everybody in leathers, or everybody holding Chairman Mao's book, and if everybody goes to one end of the pitch, I always go to the other.

I try not to think too much about an audience when Im writing the first draft of a book - at that stage, the prospect of anyone reading what Ive written would be enough to scare me into setting my laptop on fire.

Are there sexual fetishes that involve books? There must be. I try not to imagine how they might work.

After that, the book will fade, the way all books fade in your mind. But I hope you will remember this: A man walking fast down a dark lonely street. Quick steps and hard breathing, all wonder and need. A bell above a door and the tinkle it makes. A clerk and a ladder and warm golden light, and then: the right book exactly, at exactly the right time.

I'd sit at my kitchen table and start scanning help-wanted ads on my laptop, but then a browser tab would blink and I'd get distracted and follow a link to a long magazine article about genetically modified wine grapes. Too long, actually, so I'd add it to my reading list. Then I'd follow another link to a book review. I'd add the review to my reading list, too, then download the first chapter of the book—third in a series about vampire police. Then, help-wanted ads forgotten, I'd retreat to the living room, put my laptop on my belly, and read all day. I had a lot of free time.

(about Kindles) I have one and I use it most nights. I always imagine the books staring and whispering, Traitor!

Our books still do not require batteries. But I am no fool. It is a slender advantage.

I look for interesting titles that are curious and make people think. A lot of people are always so caught up in their lives. But if I make them smile through my titles or provoke them a little bit then maybe they will think about things and read the book and take something away from it.

Our minds are shaped by the books we read. Our characters, by the people we meet. Our spirits by the love we give.

The best leaders are the most dedicated learners. Read great books daily.

... a phallocentric culture is more likely to begin its censorship purges with books on pelvic self-examination for women or bookscontaining lyrical paeans to lesbianism than with See Him Tear and Kill Her or similar Mickey-Spillanesque titles.

It doesn't matter if I'm only to be gone four days, as in this case; I take six months' supply of reading material everywhere. Anyone who needs further explication of this eccentricity can find it usefully set out in the first pages of W. Somerset Maugham's story "The Book-Bag.

My books happen. They tend to blast in from nowhere, seize me by the throat, and howl 'Write me! Write me now!' But they rarely stand still long enough for me to see what and who they are, before they hurtle away again. And so I spend a lot of time running after them, like a thrown rider after an escaped horse, saying 'Wait for me! Wait for me!' and waving my notebook in the air.

I began reading everyhing in the family library. Kidnapped, Treasure Island, Robinson Crusoe. And of course, if you're running out of books to read you can always read Shakespeare.

Originally, I broke the story [The Gunslinger Born] into eight comic books, but when the editors at Marvel thought we should make it more compact, I managed to cut back to seven.

There is a book yearning to come out of me: about how we can build the new collaboration economy, and the role of 'openness' in our quest for efficient use of resources and as a driver of innovation.

When I was young, my knowledge of the literary world was a distorted tabloid sketch of dazzling fame, suffering genius, and tragic glamour. It was all very naïve. Of course, the only part of the stereotype that has proven true is the suffering and the starving. Now, my fantasy of scribbling poems in a tower is gone, but an anxiety about reviews, book sales, and awards has taken its place.

I never heard of anyone who was really literate or who ever really loved books who wanted to suppress any of them. Censors only read a book with great difficulty, moving their lips as they puzzle out each syllable, when someone tells them that the book is unfit to read.

A great many complimentary things have been said about the faculty of memory, and if you look in a good quotation book you will find them neatly arranged.

If I had my way books would not be written in English but in an exceedingly difficult secret language.... This plan would have the advantage of scaring off all amateur authors, retired politicians, country doctors...who would not have the patience to learn the secret language.

I came at last to a recognition of myself as, in part, a Tom Sawyer who wanted everything done according to the rules of romantic fiction, and complicated simple solutions with his absurd adolescent, book-born nonsense.