Book Quotes - Page 601

I think when people hear about a celebrity writing a book of any kind, the assumption is that it was dictated to a ghostwriter.

Books have always been really important to me; they're my saving grace.

I think once you sort of cross over and you realize what books can be - and if they mean something to you - there's just no stopping you.

When I was turning 40, I felt that there were no books out there that hit the spot in terms of what I wanted to read.

Whenever people ask me how I manage to get through this whole crazy time of being incredibly famous and sort of an icon and supposedly a role model and all of this insanity, I always cite my family and then books. I don't know what I would have done without books.

If you want to hurt me, fine. Take my books. Burn down my house. Shave my head while I am sleeping. But nobody, nobody screws with my dog.

Wal-mart started selling “Vampire Home Defense Kits”, including holy water, crosses, stakes, mallets, and a book of quick blessings to bar vampires from your door. The fact that these kits were generally useless didn't bother me nearly as much as the idea of holy water being sold at wal-mart.

It was tricky [to write about Israelis], because everyone has an opinion about the Arab - Israeli conflict, and when I first started writing these stories, I was working for an Arab - Israeli human rights group. It was during the Second Intifada. It was this totally violent and intense time, and I think there's a part of me where I don't know how to write about that situation without getting my politics out of my messages, and that's something that was important for me not to do in this book.

The Israel stories were really hard for me to write, because I think that my book is very much about politics, but it isn't political. It really was important for me to not have a political agenda at all, because I have a hard time stomaching any political fiction that feels message-y.

It's funny - for a long time, I didn't know I was writing a book. I was writing stories. For me, each story took so long and took so much out of me, that when I finished it, I was like, Oh my gosh, I feel like I've poured everything from myself into this, and then I'd get depressed for a week. And then once I was ready to write a new story, I would want to write about something that was completely different, so I would search for a totally different character with a different set of circumstances.

I knew that I was writing for an American audience and that if I sold foreign rights, they would retranslate the book to make it make sense to that language. But one thing that was really important to me was not to italicize any of the words in the languages that were in the stories, because I feel like those foreign words felt just as important and integral to the story as everything else, so I wanted it all to just exist as its own thing.

My dad had this outlook: It doesn't matter what I want to read - reading was a good thing. So whatever I was curious about they'd get for me from the library. Books were a kind of a resistance to reality. I liked to imagine worlds that were different. I still do.

Why the brevity? Because I'd rather people read my book twice than only half-way through

I take six or seven years to write really small books. There is a kind of aesthetic of leanness, of brevity.

I'd rather create a miniature painting than a Taj Mahal of a book.

The anger is useful too because when things about the world upset you, that is really a fertile feeling to channel into fiction and to put out into books.

It's in being read that a book becomes a book, and in each of a million different readings a book become one of a million different books . . .

Oftentimes I deliberately put ambiguity into my books so that... the reader is left with an echo of: 'How much of this was from me?'

I don't want to be anxious on my day-to-day life. I want to try to imagine a future I'd like to live in and then write books and do things that, in my own small way, make it more likely that that future will come to exist.

But when you read a book, what you see are black squiggles on pulped wood or, increasingly, dark pixels on a pale screen. To transform these icons into characters and events, you must imagine. And when you imagine, you create.

The notion of love as a potentially destructive and potentially redemptive human force is something that comes across in all my books.

However, unlike some of my friends and students, I don't think it's a laughing matter. I think it is frightening to see what outrageous stories can be told in the United States and then are accepted by many educated people and academics as facts. Movies get awards, books become best sellers, heroes are made, and people become wealthy as a result of dishonest caricatures of Iranian people and society.

I have no perspective as regards my work. One reason I put out records and books is people respond to it, and it enables you to actually see the work more clearly. It's a form of therapy for me. Sometimes abusive therapy.

Can't do any work with a rock star; you have to go through their lawyers and their agents and their managers and you have to book them hotel rooms. When you work with your friends, you just call them up and they come over and you record and then you go out to see a movie.

Call me a nerd if you like, but I do find it hard to leave home without my laptop and a good book.