One always tends to overpraise a long book, because one has got through it.
You go into the book store, there’s the cut-out of Dr. Phil, and then the dreaded women’s health section where every book, instead of the menopause book with the fanged Medusa head on the cover that might be more pertinent, you always see a flower and a poppy and a daisy and a stethoscope.
I bought the rights to this book, ‘The Ploughmen,’ by a Montana writer named Kim Zupan, and I’ve written the screenplay, and I really feel pretty strong about it. It’s really hauntingly beautiful. It’s got some suspense and great drama, but it’s a real character thing.
I want to do public speaking and cause campaigning. I want to write a book.
No two persons ever read the same book.
If one cannot enjoy reading a book over and over again, there is no use in reading it at all.
In ninth grade, I came up with a new form of rebellion. I hadn’t been getting good grades, but I decided to get all A’s without taking a book home. I didn’t go to math class, because I knew enough and had read ahead, and I placed within the top 10 people in the nation on an aptitude exam.
I work in a small study on the top floor of a brownstone in Brooklyn – it’s about 75 square feet, 11 taken up by book shelves along one wall.
There’s nothing better than curling up with a good book and sitting in front of the fire on winter evenings.
I’ve always had a foot in everything. As a kid, I was active in sports and theater. Now, I’m learning I have to focus a bit. I’m trying to get to next projects, like writing a screenplay. Once that comes together, I could put my mind to another book – maybe a fun kids’ book.
My sense of what a book should be has changed so radically. I like to think for the better.
I’m trying to create a collection of stories – the ‘U.F.O.W.A.V.E.’ songs are all stories. I haven’t really taken direct lyrical influence from other songwriters, but my dad bought me a book of W.H. Auden’s poems when I was younger, and the imagery really interested me.
How precious a book is in light of the offering, in the light of the one who has the privilege of this offering. The library tells you of this offering.
It’s very hard for me to write back to some of the fan mail, so one of the things I wanted to do was reach out through a book.
The reason a writer writes a book is to forget a book and the reason a reader reads one is to remember it.
Every book for me is a chapter in the long book which will finally be closed on the day of my death.
Paradise Lost is a book that, once put down, is very hard to pick up again.
Unlike many travel books I didn’t set out to travel with the idea of writing a book in mind.
The first sentence of a book is a handshake, perhaps an embrace.
I’m fond of science fiction. But not all science fiction. I like science fiction where there’s a scientific lesson, for example – when the science fiction book changes one thing but leaves the rest of science intact and explores the consequences of that. That’s actually very valuable.
My life is an open book. You’re welcome to speculate.
I’ve mis-signed many a book Rollins or Clemens. My readers quickly become aware. Booksellers will often promote me under both names, and I do plug both at signings. Generally, the fantasy reader has no problem going into the suspense genre. It’s harder for the typical suspense reader to go the other direction.
One of the maddening ironies of writing books is that it leaves so little time for reading others’. My bedside is piled with books, but it’s duty reading: books for book research, books for review. The ones I pine for are off on a shelf downstairs.
I placed my new novel, ‘The Book of Lost Fragrances’, in Paris, knowing it would be a challenge. But the book belonged in the city that is one of the greatest perfume capitals of the world and has been since for more than three centuries.
You can’t die with an unfinished book.
People would tell me, especially after my marriage to Prince, ‘You need to write a book because you’ve had a crazy life.’
There are several occupational hazards for book reviewers, chief among them being the Curse of the Jaded Palate – that sinking feeling when you start reading a new book and begin to suspect that you’ve seen it all before.
I’ve always been really hard on myself. If I didn’t book a job, I would cry.
The most technologically efficient machine that man has ever invented is the book.
I know what kind of books I read on vacation, and it is not necessarily ‘Diplomacy’ by Henry Kissinger. No disrespect to that book; I have read that book. But not on spring break.
Don’t worry about writing a book or getting famous or making money. Just lead an interesting life.
The way a book is read, which is to say, the qualities a reader brings to a book can have as much to do with its worth as anything the author puts into it.
I enjoy very much being in a foreign country, in a new country, new place. And I enjoy also beginning a new book. It’s like being someone else.
In true education, anything that comes to our hand is as good as a book: the prank of a page- boy, the blunder of a servant, a bit of table talk – they are all part of the curriculum.
The world is a book, and those who do not travel read only a page.
When I was 12, I wanted to learn how to play the guitar, and I found a chord book in a shop, and I stuffed it down my trousers. And that’s how I learned to play the guitar.
You know you have a gambling problem when it’s 4 A.M. at the Mirage Sports Book and you’re walking around going, ‘Hey you get the lacrosse scores?’
I would never require anyone to read any book. That seems antithetical to why we read – which is to choose a book for our personal reasons. I always shudder when I’m told my books are on required reading lists.
‘Harry Potter’ created a generation of readers in an era when kids could have disappeared into the depths of the Internet. That’s no small feat. Every book series owes J.K. Rowling a debt of gratitude.
I grew up on Harvard Square and I watched 50-year old men walking around with green book bags slung over their shoulders going for their fourth PhD, never having left the world of academia to alleged reality.
I am sure of this: that no one can write a book which children will like unless he write it for himself first.
My mother says I was two-and-a-half when I started playing. My father was a minister, and when he went to church in the morning, she would put on Fats Waller, Billie Holiday, Nat King Cole and Cole Porter records. I’d crawl up on the piano stool, sit on a phone book and play.
If I can be somewhere with sunshine and have bare feet and a book, I’m happy.
Each has his past shut in him like the leaves of a book known to him by his heart, and his friends can only read the title.
I usually write about ordinary people and ordinary things, but Paul Farmer is the least ordinary person I’ve ever met… He’s the leader of a small group of people who hope to cure a sick world, and I hope my book can help in some small way.
I first got to know Charles in the late seventies when I wrote an article and then a book about him and I think at the time he came across as quite appealing, it was probably the height of his popularity.
I love real books, paper books, but I also love buying online, and I think that people are more willing to take a chance to read something if it’s cheaper – sometimes books on the Kindle are $6. A hardback book is $25. For $25, it better be a really great book. Or you’re going to be mad.
‘Classic.’ A book which people praise and don’t read.
Film music should have the same relationship to the film drama that somebody’s piano playing in my living room has on the book I am reading.
Writing a book about yourself is like therapy, and you go ‘Oh My God, that’s the reason that happened.’ Writing about it, you’re forced to really examine things.
I think as a young person, leaving high school or college, you’re like, ‘All right, all right, enough already.’ But now there’s a part of me that would like to go back and relish those moments when you could sit down and just… read a book.
