Book Quotes - Page 688

I was writing the Paraguay book, a Paragauyan told me that only five thousand people in Paraguay read.

A lot of books are sold and given away as presents. But who actually reads and enjoy reading?

If you see our best seller list, most of them are books that are given as gifts. They are books you give to flatter somebody.

It never stops me from saying what I want to say about Ethiopia, the fact that a tour company is paid for me to go there. Book reviewers don't pay for the books they review.

I slightly feel, having written Paraguay and Newfoundland - and both of them have developed eccentricities through isolation - I am quite relieved to be back in France and Germany, and I want people to enjoy these books for the writing and not because they feel they can laugh - some will laugh - at these eccentric places, that's not what I intend.

I want people to laugh with me and Paraguay and Newfoundland, but I don't want to laugh at them. I hope in my books at the end of the day you come across with the impression that I really admire both of these places.

It isn't. The Book of Abraham is not central to the restored gospel of Christ.

Variety's the source of joy below, From whence still fresh-revolving pleasures flow, In books and love the mind one end pursues, And only change the expiring flames renews.

There are some books and characters so pleasant, or rather which contain so much that is pleasant, that criticism is perplexed or silent. The hounds are perpetually at fault among the sweet-scented herbs and flowers that grow at the base of Etna.

For years I walked around with the phrase "Green River" because I had seen that on a soda fountain drink when I was probably 8 or 9 years old, and I went, 'Gee, I like that.' Another one was "Lodi", which I thought sounded really cool. I got this cheap little empty plastic notebook at my local drugstore, and bought a little slab of filler paper and the very first title I wrote in it was "Proud Mary". I had no idea what that title meant.

My freind is the man who gives me a book I aint read."Abraham Linclion

So I learnt a few country western songs, I bought a chord book, and right away I started writing my own stuff, which nobody else did that, I don't know why.

Hell, I'm going to play pro basketball. I'm going to maybe be famous. I'm going to write books.

I really dislike when people talk about "experimental," because any good writer is experimental. As a writer, you don't know what the hell you're doing. You're just doing it. You hope it works out well. I've been experimenting with these things myself in my own books.

Books are an attempt to control something that's uncontrollable. That's one of the beauties of African American life. There was this thing called slavery and adjustments were made. It literally destroyed millions, but it didn't destroy the inner lives of all the people who experienced it. There are still horrible things that go on because of the myth of race, but we don't have to succumb totally. If I had only a negative side of things to present, I think I would have much less of a drive to do it. Because what would be the point?

Remember that a book is many drafts - mine certainly are. It's improvisation. It's as much jazz and the way we talk and the way I heard people preach coming up as it is writing.

Books are an attempt to control something that's uncontrollable.

A living faith is always on trial; we call it faith for that reason. When I read in some alarmist book that the Christian faith is now on trial, or "at the crossroads," my impulse is to answer, Why Not? Does anybody know a time when the Christian faith was not on trial, or when the Christian life was a simple walkover, with neither principalities nor powers to dispute its advance?

There is no better indicators of character than the books you have.

Actually, my first literary heroes were the Romantic poets, so I began to get serious by writing poems. I have notebooks full of them that I cherish but am afraid to look at.

The Enormous Room seems to me to be the book that has nearest approached the mood of reckless adventure in which men will reach the white heat of imagination needed to fuse the soggy disjointed complexity of the industrial life about us into seething fluid of creation. There can be no more playing safe.

The world is a great volume, and man the index of that book; even in the body of man, you may turn to the whole world.

A book or a letter may institute a more intimate association between human beings separated thousands of miles from each other than exists between dwellers under the same roof.

Books, in the plural lose their solidity of substance and become a gas, filling all available space.

Books should to one of these fours ends conduce, for wisdom, piety, delight, or use.