Book Quotes - Page 668

The doings of men, their prayers, fear, wrath, pleasure, delights, and recreations, are the subject of this book.

I've never read a book [ Nnedi Okorafor's Lagoon] like it before. Big and sprawling with a million points of view, including sea creatures. It's about an alien invasion that starts in Lagos, Nigeria but, really, that's just the starting point.

I've known white Australian girls from wealthy families who were sent to posh private schools, who knew all of that stuff, and I think would recognise much in Jefferson's book. What I related to most strongly was the sexism and misogyny Margo Jefferson had to battle.

My Sister Rosa was bumped from the schedule. None of my books has ever been bumped before. It freaked me out.

I decided to read something I normally hate: a cosy mystery. You know one of those mysteries where everything is tidily wrapped up at the end and everyone lives happily ever after? An Agatha Christie kind of mystery. They are so not my thing. But then someone was raving about Barbara Neely's Blanche White books and they sounded interesting.

I'm catching up. I'm satisfied with the show. I think I want to get better and better and keep building. It took a while to figure out how to do it. I didn't know how it was gonna go. I was just like, "I better book a show and just see what happens."

I’m sure there’s some self-help cheese-ball book about the gray area, but I’ve been having this conversation with my friends who are all about the same age and I’m saying, ‘Y’know, life doesn’t happen in black and white.’ The gray area is where you become an adult the medium temperature, the gray area, the place between black and white. That’s the place where life happens.

Actually, I'm reading a lot of my scripts. When I'm working on something, it's hard to find time. You're always prepping new material. You don't want to be buried in a book. It splits your focus a little bit.

I haven't had a chance to pick up a good book in a long time, because I've been either reading scripts or learning them or writing them. And so, by the time the day is done, I usually just want to click on The Bachelor and fall asleep. But I gravitate toward biographies and things like that.

I just wanted to compile these stories about growing up with my father and I wanted people to be able to enjoy them individually, but also the entire book as a whole.

I feel like if I'm going to give you a book about my dad, then I really want to give you my dad, because he is interesting and he is funny and if you're buying a book about him, I don't want you to have to sit through stuff that's not him.

Although Kurt Vonnegut may not be considered a humor writer, 'Breakfast of Champions' is one of the funniest books I've ever read.

One of the traps or the pitfalls of writing a trilogy - or a triptych, or whatever term you want to use - is that the second book can be a long second act to get you from book one to book three, which borrows all of its energy from the first book.

You learn to write by reading, and my experiences and tastes as a reader are pretty wide.

One thing that worried me was how writers get categorized and so they end up having to write the same kind of book again and again. That is fine if it is what you want to do, but I would rather be locked in the trunk of my car with a weasel than write the same book every three years until I die.

There was something in the pages of these books that had the power to make him feel better about things, a life raft to cling to before the dark currents of memory washed him downstream again, and on brighter days, he could even see himself going on this way for some time. A small but passable life. And then, of course, the end of the world happened.

Every book has got its challenges. You run into a plot point that you can't figure out, or a scene that you struggle to write and have to write 50 times.

There's an outline for each of the books that I adhere to pretty closely, but I'm not averse to taking it in a new direction, as long as I can get it back to where I need it to go.

So, whenever I'm writing, I'm writing in the presence of all the other books I've read and I think we all are.

That literary-popular distinction is, in my view, vastly overstated. At the far poles there are clearly books that are purely commercial and purely literary, written for audiences that want to see the same thing enacted over and over and over again. But the middle is where most people read and most people write.

I write for the people I grew up with. I took extreme pains for my book to not be a native informant. Not: 'This is Dominican food. This is a Spanish word.' I trust my readers, even non-Spanish ones.

My novel, which I had started with such hope shortly after publishing my first book of stories, wouldn't budge past the 75-page mark. Nothing I wrote past page 75 made any kind of sense. Nothing. Which would have been fine if the first 75 pages hadn't been pretty damn cool.

The Prisoner's Wife echoes Edwidge Danticat's Farming of the Bones in the urgency in which it reminds us of the possibility of love even amidst the ruins. This is a terrifying, heart-breaking and, ultimately, important book.

You're the only person I've ever met who can stand a bookstore as long as I can.

I love “The Autobiography of Malcolm X.” That was like the only black book we read in high school...