Book Quotes - Page 626

I have an enduring, very robust infatuation with dictators. I have an infatuation with Stalin, Mao, and Mussolini. In the Paris Review interview I did (in 2013), I said my next book, this one, was going to be about Mussolini. I wound up only having a Mussolini cameo in the book.

Van Ritzen is one of the funniest humans I've ever met. Read her book, laugh, lather, rinse, repeat.

Neiman's book is written with considerable flair, as many critics have already noted, but it possesses a far rarer and more valuable quality: moral seriousness. Her argument builds a powerful emotional force, a sense of deep inevitability. . . . It is not often that a work of such dark conclusions has felt so hopeful and brave.

I just stopped reading a lot of books. I mean, I read books that I have to read for school, but I don't actually pick up a book and read for fun. On my time off, I go to movies, hang out with friends, go shopping...just little things.

I'm sort of murdered for selling books. The idea is, if you make money your work can't be literary.

[When] he's here, he's always reading. He says books stop time. I myself think he's crazy...Don't tell anyone, but when he reads something that he likes he gets real happy, turns on the music, and dances by himself, or with a broom sometimes.

I follow my own nose. So I read things that are different. People will always say to me, "Have you read Robert S. Bosco's latest novel?" or "Have you read so and so's history of Peru, which is reviewed in the New York Review of Books and the New York Times and has a buzz about it?" I don't even know what you're talking about. I'm like from another planet. I'm a pygmy from the jungle.

If one book's done this well, you want to write another one that does just as well. There's that horror of the second novel that doesn't match up.

I read very, very little fiction as a kid. All the books I can remember are junior science books.

And I know I can do this because I went to London on my own, and because I solved the mystery…and I was brave and I wrote a book and that means I can do anything.

Jane Austen was writing about boring people with desperately limited lives. We forget this because we've seen too many of her books on screen.

The most difficult book I wrote was the fourth in a series of linked children's books. It was like pulling teeth because the publisher wanted exactly the same but completely different. I'd much rather just do something completely different even if there's a risk of it going wrong.

Books are like people. Some look deceptively attractive from a distance, some deceptively unappealing; some are easy company, some demand hard work that isn’t guaranteed to pay off. Some become friends and say friends for life. Some change in our absence - or perhaps it is we who change in theirs - and we meet up again only to find that we don’t get along any more.

I think good books have to make a few people angry.

Curious Incident is not a book about asperger's....if anything it's a novel about difference, about being an outsider, about seeing the world in a surprising and revealing way. The book is not specifically about any specific disorder.

When I was seven or eight, I was bought a fantastic book called 'The Movie Treasury of Horror Movies' by Alan G. Frank; it became my bible. It's packed full of the most amazing photos and is still fantastic to look at.

I have said repeatedly that in this country we track library books better than we do sex offenders.

The central premise of this book is that the Western psychological notion of what it means to have a self is flawed.

There’s no need to get rid of literally hundreds of thousands of books that are fine simply because you have a problem with an isolated book or piece of literature that presents extremism.

There are some disturbing messages in the Koran, there were declarations of war against non-believers, there's a declaration that Islam should be triumphant over other religions, the problem is this is not just in the book, but preached throughout the Islamic world that are preached, we in the West hear about that.

It's not so much less pressure, it's less work, which is really exciting to me. I'm just personally looking forward to being able to spend a little more time doing different things, so that's really great. Jay and I are writing a book this year which is really fun and so yeah, I am very excited to spend less crazy 12-hour days on set. Those were taxing times.

To retire by the age of 35 was my goal. I wasn't sure how I was going to get there though. I knew I would end up owning my own business someday, so I figured my challenge was to learn as much as anyone about all businesses. I believed that every job I took was really me getting paid to learn about a new industry. I spent as much time as I could, learning and reading everything about business I could get my hands on. I used to go into the library for hours and hours reading business books and magazines.

If it had anything to do with the PC or networking industry I was on top of it. I bought manuals. I read every book and magazine. Then I would get involved with industry conferences and put myself out there.

My first company was MicroSolutions. I worked 20 hours a day. I didn't take a vacation for 7 years. I didn't even take the time to read a fiction book. It was all about work. When I sold it, I promised myself I would never wear a watch and only wear a suit to weddings, funerals and to meet the President.

At heart, Pearson is in the intellectual property business, be it through publishing books or the Financial Times.