Book Quotes - Page 669

We hide so well. This is the bottom line: how hidden is male subjectivity? Name five books where male subjectivity is produced in an honest way.

My art feels like it's real disobedient. I can fill notebooks with observations and maybe they find their way into the work unconsciously, which is great. I've never been able to directly plug, like to take a little snip that I've picked up on the street and transfer it into a story. I don't know what's wrong, but it never works that way.

I have three storage units, and that's no lie. Three storage units. All books.

Books are wonderful, but they aren't that powerful.

Books don't live and die by awards. You don't listen to an Hector Lavoe album because it won some awards.

When I was working on 'Drown' - this was way back in the mid-'90s - I had this idea that I wanted to do another collected stories. I wanted to do another book like 'Drown' that focused specifically on infidelity.

Books are surviving in this intense, fragmented, hyper-accelerated present, and my sense and hope is that things will slow down again and people will want more time for a contemplative life. There is no way people can keep up this pace. No one is happy. Two or three hours to read should not be an unattainable thing, although I hope we get to that stage without needing a corporate sponsored app to hold our hand. The utopian in me has my fingers crossed that we haven't quite figured out the digital future just yet. After all, the one thing we know about people: they always surprise.

We all dream dreams of unity, of purity; we all dream that there's an authoritative voice out there that will explain things, including ourselves. If it wasn't for our longing for these things, I doubt the novel or the short story would exist in its current form. I'm not going to say much more on the topic. Just remember: In dictatorships, only one person is really allowed to speak. And when I write a book or a story, I too am the only one speaking, no matter how I hide behind my characters.

But it's clear to me that us slow-poke writers are a dying breed. It's amazing how thoroughly my young writing students have internalized the new machine rhythm, the rush many of my young writers are in to publish. The majority don't want to sit on a book for four, five years. The majority don't want to listen to the silence inside and outside for their artistic imprimatur. The majority want to publish fast, publish now.

A form wherein we can enjoy simultaneously what is best in both the novel and the short story form. My plan was to create a book that affords readers some of the novel's long-form pleasures but that also contains the short story's ability to capture what is so difficult about being human - the brevity of our moments, their cruel irrevocability.

I think it's important to find projects that evoke people into conversation. It's like reading a good book. You want to talk about it.

My whole thing is, I collect what I know I want to read, and I have certain bookshelves in my bedroom that contain all the books I haven't read yet.

The sexual revolution... it was the first time I had read anything that came close to describing those feelings of being outside of my body, feeling the shame, all of it, that I really was able to connect to in that book. So it sort of blew my mind. I was also listening to Tori Amos at the same time, so I was like, "Wait, what's happening?!" It was all a part of that, probably when I was, like, 13.

There's a book called The Women's Room by Marilyn French that was a really big part of my personal feminist awakening growing up that I read.

My advice to aspiring writers of fantasy trilogies or series is that each book needs two main plots. There's the 'big story', the over-arching grand plot of the entire series, and there is the complete-in-itself, one-book plot.

Let us hope that good authors who are bad Christians will find salvation through the books they write.

My mother says that some books are good no matter when you read them, and some are good at a particular moment; they come into your life at just the right time.

Believing in books is a lot like believing in God.

Boredom is why God invented books.

You will stay up all night reading this brilliant and devastating novel the way you might have with a new best friend in junior high-one whose revelations thrilled and terrified you, and whose raw, hard-earned wisdom remade the way you saw the world. It evokes the genius of Angela Pneumans canonical progenitors: Flannery O'Connor, Katherine Anne Porter, Walker Percy. Lay It on My Heart is a gorgeous, riveting, and unforgettable book.

I find research fascinating and always conduct some before I begin writing, and then fill in the rest as needed. I read stacks of books and also had the opportunity to travel to England to do more research.

While researching my first book, I discovered so many fascinating tidbits that I wanted to share them with readers to remind them that while the book was fiction, the situations were based on historical realities - some of which were pretty hard to believe.

What to do Before Your Book Launch is the new invaluable tool for writers. There is so much to know and now it’s all in one place.

Overall, Id say I was an awesome bookseller, but probably not the best book shelver. I loved recommending books and helping people find books.

I worked at a Books-a-Million in Louisville for several years.