A man in a bookstore buys a book on loneliness and every woman in the store hits on him. A woman buys a book on loneliness and the store clears out.
I've said to others that there were places I had forgotten about that were just so powerful. I've read the Gospels many times, but it's been a while since I've read through a whole book
The simplest comment on my book came from my ballet teacher. She said, "I wish you hadn't made every line funny. It's so depressing. "
How strange that some people cannot believe in both the Book of Nature and the Book of God.
Paper Matches My aunts washed dishes while the uncles squirted each other on the lawn with garden hoses. Why are we in here, I said, and they are out there? That’s the way it is, said Aunt Hetty, the shriveled-up one. I have the rages that small animals have, being small, being animal. Written on me was a message, “At Your Service,” like a book of paper matches. One by one we were taken out and struck. We come bearing supper, our heads on fire.
All I am really promoting in the books is the Golden Rule, which I hope everybody knows to be "do as you would be done by. " It has one or 2 flaws, but it is a good soundbite. Evil starts when you treat other people as things. There are perhaps worse crimes, but they begin when you treat other people as things.
There's this quote by a writer, Emil Cioran, he's a Romanian writer. He says that you should only put things in books that you would never dare to say to people in real life. So there is that feeling of acute embarrassment, or that you've been too revealing. I think it's some kind of survival mechanism where I never think of the reader, ever. Because then I would start censoring myself.
I have even written a book about Wine called The Grapes of Ralph.
What we need now are heroes and heroines, about a million of them, one brave deed is worth a thousand books. Sentiment without action is the ruin of the soul.
A tell-all book by David Axelrod, one of President Obama's former strategists, reveals that Obama chose Joe Biden as his VP because of his energy and enthusiasm. You know, the qualities you look for in someone whose main job is traveling to state funerals.
The thread of will-they-or-won't-they was the real driver of every word and glance and shift of body. So. . . this was a date, Blay thought. A subtextual negotiation slipcovered in talk of books read and music enjoyed.
The plot is very important because writers have to play fair with their readers, but no one would care about the plot if the character work wasn't there. So, basically every book I work on starts with me thinking not just about the bad thing that's going to happen, but how that bad thing is going to ripple through the community, the family of the victim, and the lives of the investigators. I am keenly aware when I'm working that the crimes I am writing about have happened to real people. I take that very seriously.
To make sure that my blasphemy is thoroughly expressed, I hereby state my opinion that the notion of a god is a basic superstition, that there is no evidence for the existence of any god(s), that devils, demons, angels and saints are myths, that there is no life after death, heaven nor hell, that the Pope is a dangerous, bigoted, medieval dinosaur, and that the Holy Ghost is a comic-book character worthy of laughter and derision.
So, when people try to give you some book with a shiny round award on the cover, be kind and gracious, but tell them you don't read "fantasy," because you prefer stories that are real. Then come back here and continue your research on the cult of evil Librarians who secretly rule the world.
I look to Islamic ethics to find something that can provide the basis for shared values with other traditions, and ultimately universal values. This ties into the point I made in a book, The Quest for Meaning, that the only way for values to be universal is if they are shared universal values. My main point is, in this quest for value the aim is not to express your distinctness from others, but about being able to contribute to the discussion of universal value.
Now we not only need to say more about the Book of Mormon, but we need to do more with it.
Books are not men and yet they stay alive.
I am not some preaching farmer with a book under my arm; I am a graduate of Harvard College.
Books that have become classics - books that have had their day and now get more praise than perusal - always remind me of retired colonels and majors and captains who, having reached the age limit, find themselves retired on half pay.
When I do get to chow down on a book, I try to read ones that are nothing like what I'm writing. So, as I'm currently working on a space opera (of sorts) I'm mostly indulging in urban fantasy.