Quotes of All Topics . Occasions . Authors
Success is so fleeting; even if you get a good book deal, or your book is a huge success, there's always the fear: 'What about the next one?'
A good book or movie or screenplay should be emotionally satisfying. When they're done, you want people to breathe a deep sigh and say, 'Wow.'
Bliss is the ocean, a towel on the sand, the sun out, the chance to swim in waves or walk dragging a stick behind you, a good book, a cold drink.
You don't need to have kids to write a good book for kids. I don't want my kids to see themselves in my books. Their lives should be their lives.
Other writers definitely influence my writing. What encourages me and inspires me is when I read a good book. It makes me want to be a better writer.
I've always thought that a good book should be either the entry point inward, to learn about yourself, or a door outward, to open you up to new worlds.
I remember, even in college, reading Cliffs Notes about a book and thinking to myself, 'Geez, that sounds like a good book. I should probably read it.'
It's easy to get published once you have written a really good book and the hard part, 99 percent of what you need to worry about, is really finishing it.
What I really mean is that a great book should leave you with many experiences, and slightly exhausted at the end. You live several lives while reading it.
I blurbed a nice book, not at all like my book 'The Big Oyster,' called 'The Essential Oyster.' I blurbed a pretty good book about meat called 'Meathooked.'
A good book, in the language of the book-sellers, is a salable one; in that of the curious, a scarce one; in that of men of sense, a useful and instructive one.
A truly good book teaches me better than to read it. I must soon lay it down, and commence living on its hint. What I began by reading, I must finish by acting.
Anyways, I am a nerd, bookworm, geek... whatever you want to call me. I'm the type of person that would rather sit down and read a good book than go out and party.
A person who publishes a book willfully appears before the populace with his pants down. If it is a good book nothing can hurt him. If it is a bad book nothing can help him.
My husband asked me once why I read so many mysteries, and part of it is just intellectual, part of it is the joy of any good book, but part of it is the moral stakes there.
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.
Writers aren't in competition with one another. It isn't a zero sum game. If you have a good book, a good cover, a good product description, and a low price, you can sell well.
I daily disconnect and read a good book or listen to a good sermon or call a friend or my mom and talk on the phone with my feet up. I also take baths with bath salts that I make myself.
I like to think that I could praise the good book of someone I personally dislike. I try not to comment on the person, to be insulting, but I have no trouble being insulting to the work.
I love poetry. If my mind gets a bit tight or bound up with information or depressed with bad news, I find a good book of poetry is like going to the gym for an hour. My mind just expands.
The first book really was kind of an entertaining textbook for the homemaker. I couldn't find a good book about entertaining in 1982, and neither could my friend, so I decided to write it.
There are people who say they want to write novels. They think, 'I'll learn my craft on the romance novel.' If you don't love the genre, it's going to show, and it's not going to be a good book.
Most people travel with a good book, but I also keep my agenda with me; I'll flip through the pages and take a few moments to organize my life a little - I rarely get the time to do this normally.
I honestly don't think Peter is that interesting without Harriet - the only exception being 'The Nine Tailors', which is such a good book it doesn't really matter whether he's got a consort or not.
If only one in 1,000 people that I talk to goes on to write a good book, that's one more good book that I've helped along... and maybe it will be a book I love myself five or 10 years down the line.
Older teens tend to write to me and say, 'Thank you for not writing down to teenagers.' And then there are the letters from adults who say, 'This is such a good book; why did you write it for teens?'
There were times over the years when life was not easy, but if you're working a few hours a day and you've got a good book to read, and you can go outside to the beach and dig for clams, you're okay.
My main piece of advice would be don't worry about being published - just write a really good book, but also don't be afraid to write a bad book. Give yourself permission to fail, and don't be afraid.
A good book ought to bring out lots of different responses from those that read it - none of them pre-planned, and all of them very personal. Whatever they take away from the reading of the book is valuable.
Usually, if I can't fall asleep, you will find me catching up on a good book or zoning out with an episode of 'The Real Housewives.' I always have a couple books on my bedside table in various stages of completion.
A bad book and good marketing won't work, the same way a good book and bad marketing will also not work. There is no choice in the matter that if you need to write a good book, you also need to have good marketing for it.
Don't get me wrong, I love watching episodes of my favorite shows on Hulu and reading the daily trash on PageSix, but I also embrace the opportunity to settle down with a good book and let my mind travel to another place and time.
Fantasy for me as a kid was real, and I had a fantasy about what life was, whether it was sort of wicked and dire, or wholly normal, or whatever. Anything really close to home is not, it seems to me, what a good book should be about.
I think it's a fallacy to say that a good book sells itself. It doesn't happen. I'm a voracious reader and I can give you a long list of books which should have been best sellers but they aren't. How can you buy a book if you haven't heard of it?
For starters, let's dispense with the cheap jokes about cannibalism. That means cracks about giving an arm and a leg - sorry - for a good book on the subject, or similar tasteless - sorry, again - attempts to make the subject more palatable - last one.
I think kids want the same thing from a book that adults want - a fast-paced story, characters worth caring about, humor, surprises, and mystery. A good book always keeps you asking questions, and makes you keep turning pages so you can find out the answers.
I enjoy art, architecture, museums, churches and temples; anything that gives me insight into the history and soul of the place I'm in. I can also be a beach bum - I like to laze in the shade of a palm tree with a good book or float in a warm sea at sundown.
Ever since I was young, 14 or 15, I wondered if you could write a book that combined the visceral thrill of watching a movie with the total immersion you feel when you're inside a good book. And I had some success as a screenwriter before I began writing books.
I'll always be reading a good book. I don't have, like, specific genre tastes or anything or things that I kind of get hooked on, reading genre books or anything like that. It's just really anything anyone kind of recommends or is going around or I hear is good.
Ah, 'Kismet,' or Carry On Camel, as we called it. I thought the show was shocking. It was the worst designed production ever but it's got a fantastic score. It's not an awfully good book though. You really have to work hard to eke out any laughs from that script.
We've been called the soundtrack of people's lives. There have been lots of downs, of course but mostly ups. That EW&F is still clicking at least twenty years on and has a life of its own, that the songs have stayed alive - we're like a good book that people go back to.
The Museum of the Bible, the sprawling, 430,000-square-foot tribute to the good book, has been dogged by controversies long before opening day. It's been criticized for not including enough Jesus, for excluding various religious traditions, and for being evangelical propaganda.
I checked to see if there'd been a really good book published in the last few decades. Then I started with what Cleopatra would have read, asking myself, 'What can we know about her education?' It turns out to be a very great deal, and bizarrely, no one had written about that before.
Even if you aren't a believer, there are incredible stories in the 'good book' that I guarantee you will keep you glued to the page. The Bible is no less a part of our cultural heritage than Shakespeare is - and by the way, Shakespeare's plays are absolutely loaded with Biblical references.
Published in 1947, 'The Plague' has often been read as an allegory, a book that is really about the occupation of France, say, or the human condition. But it's also a very good book about plagues, and about how people react to them - a whole category of human behavior that we have forgotten.
I remember going over proofs of this book - my first book - back in 2001, in a bar in Toronto called the 'Victory Cafe', and thinking sadly to myself, 'This is a very good manuscript but not a very good book.' I don't know what I meant by that, but I was pretty heartbroken and sure it was true.
Readers really want to come back to an author; they do not want a one-book wonder. That is all very well, but to be career author, you have to be prepared to write one really good book and then write another really good book and keep feeding your readers. You build your audience over a long time.
Shakespeare is renewed each time you see it or read it. I've seen 'Midsummer Night's Dream' so many times, and each time it's a little different, or a different line leaps out at me. It's like re-reading a good book over and over, always noticing something you hadn't seen the time before - and that's rare.
When I was a teenager, reading for me was as normal, as unremarkable as eating or breathing. Reading gave flight to my imagination and strengthened my understanding of the world, the society I lived in, and myself. More importantly, reading was fun, a way to live more than one life as I immersed myself in each good book I read.