Books
BooksYou can get away with saying almost anything as long as you attribute it to Samuel Johnson, Marcus Aurelius or Dorothy Parker.All Shakespeare did was string together a whole lot of well-known quotations. Terry Pratchett used to say that literature was a stew. As a young writer, you ladle stuff out of the communal stewpot. As an older writer sometimes you realise you've added a few leeks, several carrots, a potato and a turnip to the stew that it didn't contain before. The stew bubbles on.(Neil Gaiman) (Isaac Asimov): "In 1977 I wrote my autobiography. Since I was dealing with my favourite subject, I wrote at length with 640,000 words" ... well respected author. They would always get people coming up to them saying, "Oh, I've always wanted to be a writer." The authors observation was that most these people don't want to write they want to have written. Anyone who says they have only one life to live must not know how to read a book Every man who knows how to read has it in his power to magnify and multiply the ways in which he exists, to make his life full, significant and interesting. Outside of a dog, a book is man's best friend. Inside of a dog it's too dark to read. Reading is to the mind what exercise is to the body. From the moment I picked your book up until I laid it down, I was convulsed with laughter. Someday I intend reading it. Groucho Marx Always read something that will make you look good if you die in the middle of it. I'm writing a book. So far I've got the page numbers done. God and other artists are always a little obscure. ~Oscar Wilde What a book a devil's chaplain might write on the clumsy, wasteful, blundering, low, and horribly cruel work of nature!Charles Darwin You cd make a good case for banning all poetry on the grounds that almost all of it is bad. No-one would manufacture 1000 tons of jam on the expectation that a hundredweight of it might be edible. The covers of this book are too far apart. Ambrose Bierce I am being frank about myself in this book. I tell of my first mistake on page 850. Henry A. Kissinger Most new books are forgotten within a year, especially by those who borrow them. A house without books is like a room without windows. “Fairy tales are more than true: not because they tell us that dragons exist, but because they tell us that dragons can be beaten.”(paraphrase of much longer Chesterton quote) Writers should be read and not seen. Listening to two people describe the same accident makes you wonder about history books. I find television to be very educating. Every time somebody turns on the set, I go in the other room and read a book. ~Groucho Marx I would be most content if my children grew up to be the kind of people who think decorating consists mostly of building enough bookshelves. Thank you for sending me a copy of your book. I'll waste no time reading it. Fiction reveals truths that reality obscures. Reading fostered a sense of individual voices and individuality, and it formed the C20. The Internet fosters a sense of being a unit among 7 billion people, and it is forming C21. There are two motives for reading a book: one, that you enjoy it; the other, that you can boast about it. In the case of good books, the point is not how many of them you can get through, but rather how many can get through to you. A great artist is always before his time or behind it. "People think that I must be a very strange person. This is not correct. I have the heart of a small boy. It is in a glass jar on my desk." Stephen King A classic is something that everybody wants to have read and nobody wants to read. Mark Twain, Books are where things are explained to you. Life is where they aren't. Books make sense of life. The only problem is that the lives they make sense of are other people's lives, never your own. The only books which influence us are those for which we are ready, and which have gone a little further down our particular path than we have yet got ourselves. Wherever they burn books they will also end up burning people. A book is a mirror; if a monkey looks in you can't expect an apostle to look out. Books have the same enemies as man: fire, moisture, animals, the weather - and what's inside them. The proponent of paper books will one day sound "like a Victorian–era man arguing the benefits of candelight over Edison's newfangled electric lanterns," Memoirs are when you write down all the good things you should have done, and leave out all the bad things you actually did. Everything is factual, except the bits that sound like fiction. I can never remember whether Moby Dick is the man or the whale. For me, Curious now feels like a 25-year-old who moved out a long way back. We talk every so often, but it doesn't need my support and my opinions are largely irrelevant. (Mark Haddon discussing The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-time) Censorship “If you only read the books that everyone else is reading, you can only think what everyone else is thinking.” ― Haruki Murikami “There are worse crimes than burning books. One of them is not reading them.” ― Joseph Brodsky “A dangerous book will always be in danger from those it threatens with the demand that they question their assumptions. They’d rather hang on to the assumptions and ban the book.” ― Ursula K. Le Guin “When truth is replaced by silence, the silence is a lie.” ― Yevgeny Yevtushenko “Censorship is to art as lynching is to justice.” ― Henry Louis Gates Jr. “What is freedom of expression? Without the freedom to offend, it ceases to exist.” ― Salman Rushdie “Censorship is the child of fear and the father of ignorance.” ― Laurie Halse Anderson “When you tear out a man’s tongue, you are not proving him a liar, you’re only telling the world that you fear what he might say.” ― George R.R. Martin “I believe in any kid’s ability to read any book and form their own judgments. It’s the job of a parent to guide his/her child through the reading of every book imaginable. Censorship of any form punishes curiosity.” ― Sherman Alexie “If all printers were determined not to print anything till they were sure it would offend nobody, there would be very little printed.” ― Benjamin Franklin “Having the freedom to read and the freedom to choose is one of the best gifts my parents ever gave me.” ― Judy Blume “Any book worth banning is a book worth reading.” ― Isaac Asimov “Banning books gives us silence when we need speech. It closes our ears when we need to listen. It makes us blind when we need sight.” ― Stephen Chbosky “Censorship is never over for those who have experienced it. It is a brand on the imagination that affects the individual who has suffered it, forever.” ― Nadine Gordimer “Yes, books are dangerous. They should be dangerous – they contain ideas.” ― Pete Hautman “Censorship, like charity, should begin at home; but unlike charity, it should end there.” ― Clare Booth Luce “Banning books is just another form of bullying. It’s all about fear and an assumption of power. The key is to address the fear and deny the power.” ― James Howe “If librarianship is the connecting of people to ideas…it is crucial to remember that we must keep and make available, not just good ideas and noble ideas, but bad ideas, silly ideas, and yes, even dangerous or wicked ideas.” — GraceAnne A. DeCandidio “Censorship of anything, at any time, in any place, on whatever pretense, has always been and always will be the last resort of the boob and the bigot.” ― Eugene O’Neill “A society that gets rid of all its troublemakers goes downhill.” ― Robert A. Heinlein “Censorship is telling a man he can’t have a steak just because a baby can’t chew it.” ― Mark Twain “Censorship is the height of vanity.” ― Martha Graham “To forbid us anything is to make us have a mind for it.” ― Michel de Montaigne |