Book Quotes - Page 769

I can remember no time when I did not understand that my mother must write books because people would have and read them; but I cannot remember one hour in which her children needed her and did not find her.

... when one reflects on the books one never has written, and never may, though their schedules lie in the beautiful chirography which marks the inception of an unexpressed thought upon the pages of one's notebook, one is aware, of any given idea, that the chances are against its ever being offered to one's dearest readers.

For years I did most of my reading on the F train between Brooklyn and Manhattan. I had long commutes, and I read tons of books on that train; I loved it.

Oh, I wish I organized my books. But I don't. I'm not an organized person. The best I can do is put the books I really like in one sort of general area, and poetry in another.

I don't think there was a particular book that made me want to write. They all did. I always wanted to write.

I do reread, kind of obsessively, partly for the surprise of how the same book reads at a different point in life, and partly to have the sense of returning to an old friend.

The most obvious – and easiest! – way to gain perspective is to put your work away for a while. The truth is, we don’t know how taking a break frees up the mind, but it does: Somehow it freshens our little neurons, or perhaps it prompts the brain to create more cleverness molecules. If you can bear to let a short piece sit a week and a book-length work a month, do so. Longer is fine, too; some authors have abandoned manuscripts for years before unearthing them and realizing, ‘Hey, this isn’t bad,’ and renewing their energy for the project.

Marie Antoinette: The Portrait of an Average Woman was one of those books I read in my mid-twenties that was life-changing. I think I had a very black-and-white view of Marie Antoinette before, but in reading that book, I developed a lot of empathy for her. She was just caught up in history. There was no place for a woman to do anything at that time anyway.

Yes, I don't read books for entertainment.

I had studied history at Brown and didn't feel like doing anything with it. What does one do with a history degree besides become a historian? And the professors in school, it seemed like they were just writing books for other professors to comment on, and vice versa - it was the most self-referential, boring world you could ever imagine.

When I was starting out, I did not do short fiction well, because I kept wanting to write books.

Fire is a speed reader, which is why the ignorant burn books: fire races through pages, takes care of all the knowledge, and never bores you with a summary.

Books remember all the things you cannot contain.

Read any of the top-selling business books, all of them talk about moving away from a top down manner of leading to a more inclusive one. It's not happening over night, but if you read the winds of change in most of the democracies in the world we are moving toward shared levels of power.

No book that is written for an external purpose is going to be a passionately felt book for the writer or the reader. I don't see the point in doing that.

You are a total stranger and you want to take my library book.

And how could anyone consent to give up the smell of open books, old or new?

Every writer hopes his or her book will be its own thing.

Even very smart people can try to shoehorn new information that just doesn't fit into an existing paradigm.For a long time the story that we've been telling ourselves is that humans are just another animal. We evolved from other animals and our place in the universe isn't particularly special. What I'm trying to convey in my book [The Sixth Extinction] is that we are unusual.

I write both at home and at coffee shops, and I have a terrible work ethic - I have a tendency to write most of my books right before the deadline. I'm trying to work on that, but so far, I'm not getting any more organized.

I think my weakness as a writer is a limited imagination, and I think my strength is a talent for reflecting the world, or sort of curating things out of the world and putting them into books.

As a writer, you always read in two minds: You read as a reader and you enjoy it, and you look at it as a writer, and you just admire the architecture and the construction.

I feel like all this stuff that we make: books and art and music, all of it. There's this energy that circles the world that wants to be made manifest, and it is just looking for someone to come through. And it's dying for you to make it. And if you don't do it, it will go find somebody else.

As I got older, I discovered that nothing within me cried out for a baby. My womb did not seem to have come equipped with that famously ticking clock. Unlike so many of my friends, I did not ache with longing whenever I saw an infant. (Though I did ache with longing, it is true, whenever I saw a good used-book shop)

I don't hate humanity and I'm not interested in people who do. Although, it's funny, actually, some of my favorite writers really do. Like Martin Amis. My dirty secret. 'London Fields' is one of my favorite books ever. And it's indefensible! But he's so funny... I forgive him everything.