Book Quotes - Page 792

There's a book of interviews with John Cage by Joan Retallack called Musicage that was finished the summer that he died, in 1992. And in one of the last interviews, he was very excited to talk about nanotechnology. There's real technophilia from him, a kind of utopian embrace of the idea that nanotechnology will free people up to do what they really want to do.

When I read John Cage's book Silence, I was growing up in Louisville, Kentucky. For me, records were a mode of time travel and geographic travel, interfacing with a much larger world. So it seemed antiquated and backwards that Cage would be so down on them.

Theres two tiers of science fiction: the McDonalds sci-fi like Star Trek, where they have an adventure and solve it before the last commercial, and there are books that once youve read, you never look at the world the same way again.

The book is a unit and is such a brilliant ergonomic unit.

We still have books because they are so brilliantly suited to the way human beings absorb information and at their best, they are among the most beautiful things we have.

Abolishing the book is like abolishing the symphony, or sonata form, or the sonnet, or the wall painting.

I know I never work in whatever gets called an office, e.g., a school office I use only for meeting students and storing books I know I'm not going to read anytime soon.

I read,' I say. 'I study and read. I bet I've read everything you've read. Don't think I haven't. I consume libraries. I wear out spines and ROM drives. I do things like get in a taxi and say, "The library, and step on it.

I have filled 3 Mead notebooks trying to figure out whether it was Them or Just Me.

One paradox of professional writing is that books written solely for money and/or acclaim will almost never be good enough to garner either.

Words and a book and a belief that the world is words.

I do believe, especially with the character of Batman, that the tone and the mood of the book is 80% of the job right there. And the more control I had over the story, the more control I had over the tone and the mood.

I'd like to emphasize that when a reader finishes a great novel, he will immediately begin looking for another. If someone loves your book, it increases the chance that he or she will look at mine. So there is no competition between writers. Another writer's success helps build a larger readership for all of us.

Whatever your favorite genre is, you can probably trace your love for it back to one single book that really moved you.

The economic and technological changes are real, but I just can't bring myself to wax apocalyptic about the future of books.

For any leftover inventory, publishers must have a program to maximize the sale of a book.

I reread "Ball Four" by Jim Bouton, the father of all sports books. Aside from that, and books like "Out of Their League" by Dave Meggyesy, sports books generally pull their punches.

TV was the boogey man when I was growing up. Video games are the boogey man now. The novel was once a boogey man. Books about lowborn people doing lowborn things were once considered a real assault on people's morals. Maybe some day video games will be looked on as a good thing, but personally I don't see it.

I will read biographies or autobiographies while I'm writing, but mostly I put books in a to-read queue, like Rachel Cusk's new novel, "Outline."

Time travel may be achieved one day, or it may not. But if it is, it should not require any fundamental change in world-view, at least for those who broadly share the world view I am presenting in this book.

Word books traditionally focus on unusual and quirky items. They tend to ignore the words that provide the skeleton of the language, without which it would fall apart, such as 'and' and 'what,' or words that provide structure to our conversation, such as 'hello.

I'd like to find a creative way to write a book that incorporates every Depeche Mode song ever.

It was important to me that the book didn't comment on being a teenager, but felt instead like a story told by a teenager.

Magic came very easy for me when I was a kid. When I was 8 years old I started doing it, and by the time I was 12, I was already published in magic books

I'm a big fan of the Pixar movies, and Ed Catmull, who wrote a book about his experiences producing them, talks about how it takes three or four years to get it right.