Book Quotes - Page 121

Only think about the people you enjoy. Only read the books you enjoy, that make you happy to be human. Only go to the events that actually make you laugh or fall in love. Only deal with the people who love you back, who are winners and want you to win too.

After working as a journalist I went to a writing program at Johns Hopkins. It was interesting because it was neither journalistic nor historical, but it emphasized writing style, and afterwards I was asked to write my first book.

Please, not again what you studied, how long you spent at it, how many books you wrote, what people thought of you - but: what did you learn?

I remember being shocked when I discovered some of my school pals didn't have books in their homes. I thought it was like not having oxygen, or hot water.

If you ask my wife, the biggest fault is my inability around the house. She says the only thing handy about me is that I'm close by. And, I have a terrible memory. I'm bad at saying no. I often double-book. There are a lot of things.

Censorship always defeats it own purpose, for it creates in the end the kind of society that is incapable of exercising real discretion.

I am a very radical person - as radical now as I was when I was younger. So my books all have in common my search for understanding of the terrible world we are living in and ways to change it.

our lives change in two ways :through the people we meet and the books we read

Books do not make life easier or more simple, but harder and more interesting.

I think of life as a good book. The further you get into it, the more it begins to make sense.

Life doesn't come with an instruction book; that's why we have fathers.

A movie is not a book. If the source material is a book, you cannot be too respectful of the book. All you owe to the book is the spirit.

There is a great deal of difference between an eager man who wants to read a book and the tired man who wants a book to read.

I write everything down. I e-mail the second I think of something, or I write notes in my BlackBerry calendar. I set up reminder alerts on my phone. And I have a notebook by my bedside so I can write down any last-minute ideas.

Every library answers a twofold need, which is often also a twofold obsession: that of conserving certain objects (books) and that of organizing them in certain ways

I have written a book. This will come as quite a shock to some. They didn't think I could read, much less write.

I'm a huge fan of Tolkien. I read those books when I was in junior high school and high school, and they had a profound effect on me. I'd read other fantasy before, but none of them that I loved like Tolkien.

Fantasy is silver and scarlet, indigo and azure, obsidian veined with gold and lapis lazuli.

For the pre-Darwinian age had come to be regarded as a Dark Age in which men still believed that the book of Genesis was a standard scientific treatise, and that the only additions to it were Galileo'a demonstration of Leonardo da Vinci's simple remark that the earth is a moon of the sun, Sir Humphrey Davy's invention of the safety lamp, the discovery of electricity, the application of steam to industrial purposes, and the penny post.

She was brilliant and joyous and she believed- probably correctly- that libraries contain the answers to all things, to everything, and that if you can't find the information you seek in the library, then such information probably doesn't exist in this or any parallel universe now or ever to be known. She was thoughtful and kind and she always believed the best of everybody. She was, above all else, a master librarian and she knew where to find any book on any subject in the shortest possible time. And she was wonderfully unhinged.

Most regular superhero books are designed to go on forever; of course, very few of them do, but the point is they are trying to throw mud against the wall and hope it will stick, and most of it slides off.

I just like the comic book sensibility. If I can turn them into films and TV series, that's just icing on the cake.

Hitler was a beginner compared to the comic-book industry.

If you want to get together in any exclusive situation and have people love you, fine - but to hang all this desperate sociology on the idea of The Cloud-Guy who has The Big Book, who knows if you've been bad or good - and CARES about any of it - to hang it all on that, folks, is the chimpanzee part of the brain working.

Writing is for stories to be read, books to be published, poems to be recited, plays to be acted, songs to be sung, newspapers to be shared, letters to be mailed, jokes to be told, notes to be passed, recipes to be cooked, messages to be exchanged, memos to be circulated, announcements to be posted, bills to be collected, posters to be displayed and diaries to be concealed. Writing is for ideas, action, reflection, and experience. It is not for having your ignorance exposed, your sensitivity destroyed, or your ability assessed.