I wrote in the book very specifically what I wanted to write about, period, and left it at.
Most of my life, I feel I have been Unicycling at the Edge of the Abyss! If fact, this will be the name of my book if I ever write one, or a one man stand up routine. I have used it as the name of a collection of my musical compositions written during the ’90s. It fits the scary journey I feel I’ve been on.
‘The Da Vinci Code’ is the most popular book of our times.
I’m opening a store at the end of the month in the New York meatpacking district. I’m launching a line of bedding this summer, and I am writing a book that will be out next January.
What is in question is a kind of book reviewing which seems to be more and more popular: the loose putting down of opinions as though they were facts, and the treating of facts as though they were opinions.
I work hard and I party hard. When I go to work, I know what I am doing and I do it to the best of my abilities. When I party, I take exactly the same rule book with me.
Why do we take pleasure in gruesome death, neatly packaged as a puzzle to which we may find a satisfactory solution through clues – or if we are not clever enough, have it revealed by the all-powerful tale-teller at the end of the book? It is something to do with being reduced to, and comforted by, playing by the rules.
Great nations write their autobiographies in three manuscripts – the book of their deeds, the book of their words and the book of their art.
I started writing at the kitchen table after midnight. It took ten months to finish that first book; I sent it to a publisher and I got some kind of prize, so it was like a dream – I was surprised to find it happening.
Everything that I do is very autobiographical. I’m trying to be as much of an open book as possible and give the audience every single piece of me.
I just like the comic book sensibility. If I can turn them into films and TV series, that’s just icing on the cake.
It’s insulting to believe that teens should have a different kind of book than an adult should.
Picture books are for everybody at any age, not books to be left behind as we grow older. The best ones leave a tantalising gap between the pictures and the words, a gap that is filled by the reader’s imagination, adding so much to the excitement of reading a book.
I found a great book called ‘Slang Through the Ages’ by Jonathon Green. It’s basically a thesaurus of historical slang, and had lots of great old uses.
People like that I wrote a book – that’s cute, but oh, making a business out of it? That’s not nice.
‘Nimona’ is about identity and if who you are is defined by what you look like. It’s not a book about body image at all, but I would be lying if I said that wasn’t in there even at the conception of it.
I propose to construct a new chart for navigating, on which I shall delineate all the sea and lands of the Ocean in their proper positions under their bearings; and further, I propose to prepare a book, and to put down all as it were in a picture, by latitude from the equator, and western longitude.
True confession time: I never know where a book is going. I get a gut feeling the story is there, then pursue it with the enthusiasm of a hunting tiger on a trail. If I knew where I was going, I’d get bored out of my mind and stop writing.
I first met the subject of X-ray diffraction of crystals in the pages of the book W. H. Bragg wrote for school children in 1925, ‘Concerning the Nature of Things.’
If a kid is reading a book about someone who looks like them but doesn’t talk like them, we stunt their growth by dissing them.
Until every soul is freely permitted to investigate every book and creed and dogma for itself, the world cannot be free.
Preachers in pulpits talked about what a great message is in the book. No matter what you do, somebody always imputes meaning into your books.
Mallarme said that everything in the world exists in order to end in a book. Today everything exists to end in a photograph.
If David Bowie wants, I’ll put him in my phone book.
‘StrengthsFinder 2.0’ is an effort to get the core message and language out to a much broader audience. We had no idea how well received the first strengths book would be by general readers – it was oriented more toward managers – or that the energy and excitement would continue to grow.
The book, you understand, was not written for publication. It was the portrayal of my emotions, the analysis of my own soul life during three months of my nineteenth year. I wrote then all the time, just as I do now, but, though the book is in diary form, it is not a diary.
I do, indeed, close my door at times and surrender myself to a book, but only because I can open the door again and see a human face looking at me.
I love putting on a candle, reading a book, and just taking a second for me.
The first book I remember loving was ‘Grug and the Big Red Apple.’ The first film I saw in the cinema was ‘Grease.’
Whenever I open a book about jazz, I turn to the index and look for Lennie Tristano, the incredible pianist; Lee Konitz, the luminous alto sax player; and Warne Marsh, the tenor player who captured some of the most beautiful sounds in the world.
You can look at my palm and see the storm coming. Read the book of my life and see I’ve overcome it.
Whenever I want to laugh, I read a wonderful book, ‘Children’s Letters to God.’ You can open it anywhere. One I read recently said, ‘Dear God, thank you for the baby brother, but what I prayed for was a puppy.’
I’m passionate and I travel the world not just as a tourist but to understand cultures… I’ve lived with Masai tribe… I travel the world and bring it back in the form of a research book that would become the starting point for the collection.
Deliver me from writers who say the way they live doesn’t matter. I’m not sure a bad person can write a good book, If art doesn’t make us better, then what on earth is it for.
Oprah’s got good politics, she’s got a good heart, and she’ll have us all up Jazzercising at six in the morning. This cannot be a bad thing, and reading a book while we’re Jazzercising. So America would be better off if Oprah were president.
The thing I love most about going to a book store is the self-help section is the biggest section because Americans know we’re screwed up. We know it. But we want to get better.
I buy a lot of books I never read. But that’s not really a waste, since all it takes is one idea from even one book to radically reshape the way a person leads, thinks and lives.
What you don’t know would make a great book.
I don’t go anywhere without a book by James Joyce called ‘Finnegan’s Wake.’
I love to read. My favorite book series is ‘Cherubs’.
I read pretty well in French and Spanish. I don’t want to read a book written in French or Spanish in translation.
It is very remarkable, that in the book of life, we find some almost of all kinds of occupations, who notwithstanding served God in their respective generations, and shone as so many lights in the world.
My mother gave me this book called Feature Films at Used Car Prices by a guy named Rick Schmidt. I gotta credit the guy, cuz he gave me the most practical advice. It empowers you.
I recommend anybody go to a bookstore, go down the self-help or new-age section, and just walk those aisles. See what book jumps out at you; there’s a good chance it’s a book you need in your life. That’s basically how I find the books that I read.
Reading a book is like re-writing it for yourself. You bring to a novel, anything you read, all your experience of the world. You bring your history and you read it in your own terms.
I lost my son in late 2011. He had been totally incapacitated from his neck down for the last eight years of his life, but his mind was alive and brilliant in those years. He even wrote a book, ‘Allegheny Mountain,’ lying at home in his hospital bed.
I wrote a book called The Taste of New Wine because I couldn’t find a book that talked about the reality of the situation and how we were dishonest and afraid.
The society in ‘The Handmaid’s Tale’ is a throwback to the early Puritans whom I studied extensively at Harvard under Perry Miller, to whom the book is dedicated.
When I write about Mickey Haller as the Lincoln lawyer, I totally see Matthew McConaughey because he took that character when that character was still fairly new to me – only two or three years old – when I knew McConaughey was going to play him. He’s also the same age, the right age, in comparison to the book.
The first four months of writing the book, my mental image is scratching with my hands through granite. My other image is pushing a train up the mountain, and it’s icy, and I’m in bare feet.
The problem with writing a book in verse is, to be successful, it has to sound like you knocked it off on a rainy Friday afternoon. It has to sound easy. When you can do it, it helps tremendously because it’s a thing that forces kids to read on. You have this unconsummated feeling if you stop.
‘Marley and Me’ was a book I was proud of and believed in, but I thought it would just have a modest audience because it is such a personal story about my marriage and my family.
I don’t want my kids to be on the streets period. I want my kids to be nerds. I want them to be book smart or playing sports – I don’t want them to know nothing about the streets.
