Book Quotes - Page 677

I have always wanted to be a published author. I write baseball books because I love the sport.

My favorite part of any baseball book - and I read a lot of them - is the anecdotes. I believe there is a story within every boxscore and for me - the more outrageous the better!

If you're reading an exciting book, it raises an expectation but it also raises a fear that the author is not going to deliver, that the expectation is not going to be met, you're going to be disappointed by a wrong turn. But when the thing is completed, the exhilaration and gratitude are deeply intense. You've gotten to read a great thing at its moment of emergence.

We need prizes as publishers... to focus attention on books, for people to know what to go look for. But often in my opinion and in probably everyone's opinion, the right books don't get chosen. Still we need books to be chosen even if they are not exactly the right ones, otherwise many people won't know what to read. As a publisher, I feel prizes are important for the publishing business. But as a writer, I think, writers shouldn't get too distracted by prizes because very often they don't go to the right person. You shouldn't take it too seriously if you haven't won a prize.

Obviously it's easier when I' m doing the adapting myself. But my feeling is, your potential upside far outweighs the downside. Ultimately, they [moviemakers] can't change your book. Your book remains on the shelf the way you wrote it. If they make a great movie of your book, then you have the equivalent of millions and millions of dollars of advertising for your book. If the movie's not that good, that doesn't mean the book's not good. It doesn't change what you've already written. It has the potential to reach more people.

It's sort of an organic process when you're adapting any book, not even just your own. You want to preserve the heart of the story and you want to preserve who the characters are, but film requires a lot of compression.

I wanted to write a book that imagined where advances in the study of genetics might lead us. Holman was the first character who came to me: I envisaged the misshapen offspring of beautiful, wealthy parents. Then I realised that he bore a striking resemblance to Toulouse-Lautrec. I developed that, made Holman an alcoholic who lives among hookers, an artist tortured by his disability.

I do always know where I'm going in my books. I know the endpoint. I've written only two thousand words of my next novel but I know what the ending will be already.

Big-endians and small-endians.

The most ignorant person, at a reasonable charge, and with a little bodily labour, might write books in philosophy, poetry, politics, laws, mathematics, and theology, without the least assistance from genius or study.

Would a writer know how to behave himself with relation td posterity? Let him consider in old books what he finds that he is glad to know, and what omissions he most laments.

I hope you will be ready to own publicly, whenever you shall be called to it, that by your great and frequent urgency you prevailed on me to publish a very loose and uncorrect account of my travels, with directions to hire some young gentleman of either university to put them in order, and correct the style, as my cousin Dampier did, by my advice, in his book called "A Voyage round the world."

A ridiculous passion which hath no being but in play-books and romances.

A true critic, in the perusal of a book, is like a dog at a feast, whose thoughts and stomach are wholly set upon what the guests fling away, and consequently is apt to snarl most when there are the fewest bones.

The important thing about any book is that you have to have a good story and that it has to be exciting. Then it's nice to add other levels underneath that people can pick up on.

The books could be completely worthless, and things we don't even read now could be considered the most important books.

There's a really wonderful book called "Man Is Not Alone" by Abraham Joshua Heschel, which makes the case that everybody is religious. You know, we've just been sort of too vigilant about our terminology and our definitions and too precious about it. But there's nobody who is indifferent to the experience of standing in front of an ocean at night. There's nobody who is indifferent to the feeling of, you know, lying on your back and looking up at the night sky.

Literature was the only religion her father practiced, when a book fell on the floor he kissed it, when he was done with a book he tried to give it away to someone who would love it.

The Torah is the foundational text for Jewish law, but the Haggadah is our book of living memory. We are not merely telling a story here. We are being called to a radical act of empathy. Here we are, embarking on an ancient, perennial attempt to give human lives - our lives - dignity.

I started carrying blank books like this one around, which I would fill with all the things I couldn't say.

He was someone whom everyone admired and liked but whom nobody knew. He was like a book that you could feel good holding, that you could talk about without ever having read, that you could recommend.

I love the idea of books being more than books, or being, rather, something other than books.

We slept in the same bed. There was never a right time to say it. It was always unnecessary. The books in my father's shed were sighing. The sheets were rising and falling around me with Anna's breathing. I thought about waking her. but it was unnecessary. There would be other nights. And how can you say I love you to someone you love? I rolled onto my side and fell asleep next to her. Here is the point of everything I have been trying to tell you... It's always necessary. I love you.

Reality Hunger is more than thought-provoking; it's one of the most beautiful books I've read in a long time.

I write because I want to end my loneliness. Books make people less alone. That, before and after everything else, is what books do. They show us that conversations are possible across distances.