Book Quotes - Page 689

When I was kid, they always used to tell me to keep notebooks. I look at my shelves now and it's just nothing but notebooks. And if I haven't gotten an idea but I have time to work, I'll pull one out and I bet there will be five or six sentences that will kick me off.

There are stylists I really love. I'm a huge Joan Didion fan - if I wrote something that she might like, then I'd feel very proud. I want the action to move as quickly as it does in A Book of Common Prayer, where one thing bonks right into another very quickly.

I think grief is a huge subject; it's one of the things that everybody is going to confront in one way or another. There's been a lot of books written about how Americans have an odd way of trying to defer grief or minimize the need to grieve. People used to have a lot more ritual grief in their lives. For the most part, we think of it as a strictly temporal process: you grieve for a time and then you're over [it], but it's also a spatial process. It travels across a map.

When I was a kid, I was a big science fiction fan, but current horror books were harder to get your hands on.

I have a hunger for justice, but art is a place I've always enjoyed being able to be free - to live in worlds that you don't have to be thinking about that all the time. I don't see myself writing Upton Sinclair books. My books are to entertain, although to me, entertainment is to make you feel sadness or to get in touch with your own pain - or fear, or to remember somebody who has gone missing from your life. That's my calling.

It's fun to just skim through piles of books in the stacks of a library.

And Lopate's anthology helped a lot too. It came out the same year I started grad school, and I remember the book's publication feeling eventful and celebratory. It got a ton of attention for giving voice to this form that had sort of slipped between the cracks. That was exciting to see.

The Sugar Frosted Nutsack is dizzyingly brilliant. Mark Leyner is a hyperkinetic shaman, who flies the banner of rum and candy and writes like a one-eyed feral bandit. His new book is supremely original, delirious and synapse-shattering.

God, he thought, her eyes are so bright, flashing, deep, full of promise, all those things eyes are in books but never are in life, and she was his.

I jotted down Oslo After Death. This would be a great title for a book, I thought. That is what I do sometimes. I jot down titles for books that I one day intend to write.

Genres do exist because frequent users of any large bookstore can instantly tell what any piece of fiction is supposed to be about by its title, its cover and its location in the shop.

Each of them is a book through which other books dream. (referring to Nodier's SMARRA and TRILBY)

College: two hundred people reading the same book. An obvious mistake. Two hundred people can read two hundred books.

When you finish reading the book [Today Matters], take the daily dozen and list them in order of how well you do them. For example, the one that I would put at the highest for me is attitude or relationships because I'm really strong at both of those. At the bottom would be health. What I tell people is, "Take one month and work on one of the daily dozen for a whole year." And so it's really a one-year personal growth plan.

I wrote the book [Today Matters] because I have a passion to help people personally grow. Really what it is, it's a personal growth book.

People say, "John, what's your personal growth?" And ask "How do you grow?" And I tell them. I thought, "Why do I keep telling them, why don't I just write a book on what I call personal growth?" And that's what this [Today Matters] book is.

I tried to write the book [Today Matters] with integrity and say, health is one of my daily dozen, and I work on it, but I don't have this right.

I literally wrote a book on it called Your Roadmap For Success. And in it I said success is three things: knowing my purpose in life, I think it's impossible for anybody to be successful until they really discover why they're here on earth and what God has planned for them; secondly, growing to my maximum potential.

I've worked very hard at giving excellent training and good materials, resources, books, and then the corporate community gives me respect. And I'm finding now that they really want a relationship with me, they're letting me in their lives, and of course, when you get in their lives you find a tremendous need for God.

I was greatly affected by a guy named Rob Briner, who died about five years ago, who wrote a book called "Roaring Lambs", which is a book on how to be salt and light in the secular community.

I hold conferences, and the result of that was that the secular community also started picking up my stuff, and pretty soon they wanted more. So I realized I could not only minister to the Christian community, but I could also minister to the corporate community. So my books started crossing over, and then I began to intentionally have them cross over.

In the book [Today Matters] I talk about successful people make important decisions early in their life, and then they manage those decisions the rest of their life.

There are pockets of the church that will "give up," and reap a bountiful harvest. They are going to have huge success, like the church has never experienced since the Book of Acts.

Now what I do is I manage that decision. And I teach them in the book how - know what decision to make and then how to manage those decisions. It's a very - it's a personal growth book [Today Matters]; that's what it is.

The Compound Effect is a must-read book for success seekers. You want to know what it takes? You want to know what to do? It's all in these pages. The Compound Effect is a clear and concise success operation manual!