Literature Quotes - Page 139

Well, a lead is the most important thing about the story.

Anyone who wants to be a writer should, if given the opportunity, hang out with "real writers," that is, poets or writers who are lions in literature, semi-lions, or published authors.

After a fellow gets famous it doesn't take long for someone to bob up that used to sit by him in school.

There isn't, even now, a great tradition of novel-writing in Afghanistan. Most of the literature is in the form of poetry.

One thing I discovered is that the book world is vast. It's easy to walk around the store - even the room with literature and poetry, where I work most often - and feel overwhelmed.

But when you are embodied in a location, in a physical plant, in a set of people, and in a common history, that constrains your evolution and your ability to evolve in certain directions.

Everything that we are making, we are making more and more complex.

The current understanding was that it was impossible to predict how something would evolve because it was a very turbulent environment full of things interacting with each other.

The organization and the environment are in concert.

An organization's reason for being, like that of any organism, is to help the parts that are in relationship to each other, to be able to deal with change in the environment.

Changing things from the top down works when things are stable.

My total year's income from working as hard as I possibly could from writing went from like $30 one year to about $70 the next year. And it made me realize that maybe you couldn't really pay the rent that way.

I had a minor in Russian history, and this was at the time when the big Cold War was going on.

I always turn in my books on time, so you can always count on a book coming out when it's supposed to.

We wanted to write the first prequels as a story that anyone could pick up.

I want to make it so that so many things happen... that you didn't expect would happen in this series, that you realize that you have to read every one of them.

In literature as in life, to conform to anything is to knuckle under to your inferiors.

You can't eat [literature], that's the problem," he said. "I've tried, it's very dry, and not at all nutritious.

On almost anything someone does in the computer business, you can go back in the literature and prove someone had done it earlier.

The Haight is just a place; the '60s was a spirit.

Leary can get a part of my mind that's kind of rusted shut grinding again, just by being around him and talking.

Well, the thing about great fictional characters from literature, and the reason that they're constantly turned into characters in movies, is that they completely speak to what makes people human.

People were incredibly kind to our family and went out of their way to help.

The point about sales is relevant because it suggests there are cultures out there that are supporting and consuming, on a vast scale, challenging works of literature. Works of literature that in the United States would sell only a few thousand copies, if they managed to find a publisher at all. The success of these texts in Spain or Italy or wherever contributes to a kind of national conversation that we're perhaps not having here in the U.S.

Now, if they're there to talk about something specifically, and I determine through my own editorial judgment, that another area isn't germane, or isn't an important part of it, that's something else. But we never agree to anything in advance, absolutely not.