Book Quotes - Page 659

The Rebecca Riots by David Williams is an unassuming book, but its significance is universal. The book and its author determined my life; they made me want to be a historian of Wales and of the world.

Theodore Dalrymple is a brilliant observer of both medicine and society, and his book wittily engages with two versions of the current nonsense: orthodox medicine on drug addiction, and romantic poets on the wisdom you supposedly enjoy from getting high.

I wonder if Karl Ove Knausgård would've written the same books today had been using Twitter. It wasn't around when he was writing those books. Those books were written during the age of the blog, with its big verbiage. The landscape has completely changed today.

My books are better thought about than read. They're insanely dull and unreadable.But they're wonderful to talk about and think about, to dip in and out of, to hold, to have on your shelf.

Knowledge exists in minds, not in books. Before what has been found can be used by practitioners, someone must organize it, integrate it, extract the message.

It would be unfair to say that I prefer the back of a book to its contents, but it is true that the sight of a lot of books gives me the hope that I may some day read them, which sometimes develops into the belief that I have read them.

Is this a topic whose time has truly come? The integration of science and religion? Or have I just written a clever book that temporarily impressed a few people and will otherwise go as quickly as it came?

I still have a full-time day job, which is why it took me five years to write An Ear to the Ground, and why I won't have another book finished by next week.

One of the things I would love to do is Axe Cop, which is a comic book. I would like to be involved in Axe Cop someday. I would also love to be in a Western.

It takes me about a week and a half to read the typical book. I don't know how many ten-day spans I have left. Eventually the unread books on my shelves will have to be abandoned, or they will join me on the pyre. The book I'm about to purchase may be among them. We all buy books we won't live to read.

It's great that in the German language I've sold almost 30 million books. Isn't that amazing?

No one was more important to the game of baseball in the last half of the 20th century than Henry Aaron and no one writes about that supremely talented man, that tumultuous time and this treasure of a game better than Howard Bryant. Together, they are an extraordinary combination, and the book Bryant has written gets to the heart of the complicated and dignified, patient and consistent genuine hero that is Henry Aaron.

Books woke me up. Books are my favorite man-made objects. I fetishize their design, smell, feel. And that they can contain such burning, complex communications is a miracle to me.

The reader is not the customer. The retailer is the customer. So I try to have as much interaction with the retailers as possible because those are my customers.

My creator owned books sell better than my mainstream books. And that makes no sense.

I need to go where I'm not comfortable. I think that's the artist's job.

I read that book How to Hug a Porcupine [by Julie Ross] - it's my parenting bible. They say you have to trust your children and give them freedom. I say, OK, but this is New York City!

I'm not a big note-taker, so I think that the way I decide is that whatever I remember I always consider something that's important. If I remember a joke then I know it's a good joke, if I remember a story then I know it's a good story, and so that's how I curate what stories I'm going to write for the book. And I go over them again, make sure there's a theme and all that stuff, but mostly, it is intuition.

The way the housing market imploded is obviously not an easy thing to explain. It's a little bit easier in a book - people can take their time, you can sort of go back and reread - but in a movie you've got two hours to not only explain things like collateralized debt obligations, but you also have to make it entertaining.

I love that thing on Amazon that you can go on and order a book, and you click on it and it says, 'You might also like,' or 'Other people who bought this have bought that.

Two must-haves for me are a great book and my iPod.

Books have always been important to me - my mom was a first grade teacher, so I grew up reading all the time.

Don't talk to the crazy kids. I longed to shout back that we weren't crazy. I'd mistaken her kid for a ghost, that's all. I wondered whether they had books about his sort of thing. Fifty Ways to Tell the Living from the Dead Before You Wind Up in a Padded Room. Yep, I'm sure the library carried that one.

Do you like manga?" she asked after a minute. "Anime?" "Anime's cool. I'm not really into it, but 1 like Japanese movies, animated or not." "Well, I'm into it. I watch the shows, read the books, chat on the boards, and all that. But this girl I know, she's completely into it. She spends most of her allowance on the books and DVDs. She can recite dialogue from them." She caught my gaze. "So would you say she belongs here?" "No. Most kids are that way about something, right? With me, it's movies. Like knowing who directed a sci-fi movie made before I was born.

Simon's walls were covered in what looked like pages ripped from a comic book, but when I squinted, I realized they were hand drawn. Some were black-and-white, but most were in full color, everything from character sketches to splash panels to full pages, done in a style that wasn't quite manga, wasn't quite comic book.