"And the books you write. They're not you. They're not me sitting here, this Henry Miller. They belong to someone else. It's terrible. You can never rest."
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Book quotes
Book
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Book quotes (page 161 of 1049)
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"I maintain that any writer of a book is fully authorised in attaching any meaning he likes to a word or phrase he intends to use. If I find an author saying, at the beginning of his book, "Let it be understood that by the word 'black' I shall always mean 'white,' and by the word 'white' I shall always mean 'black,'" I meekly accept his ruling, however injudicious I think it."
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"Anybody who likes writing a book is an idiot. Because it's impossible; it's like having a homework assignment every stinking day until it's done. And by the time you get it in, it's done and you're sitting there reading it, and you realize the 12,000 things you didn't do. I mean, writing isn't fun. It's never been fun."
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"Watching a scene from a film in slow motion is possible, but there’s an unreal air to it; reading a passage from a book slowly does nothing to rob the words of their power. A film presents images; a book creates images inside the reader, with the reader’s active participation. Books are good for your brain."
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"I think Naomi Klein was very astute with her book 'Shock Doctrine.' We make money on disaster."
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"There is nothing that has caused me to meditate more on Plato's secrecy and sphinx-like nature, than the happily preserved petit fait that under the pillow of his death-bed there was found no 'Bible,' nor anything Egyptian, Pythagorean, or Platonic - but a book of Aristophanes. How could even Plato have endured life - a Greek life which he repudiated - without an Aristophanes!"
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"We are, indeed, not among the least contented. You, however, if your belief makes you blessed then appear to be blessed! Your faces have always been more injurious to your belief than our objections have! If these glad tidings of your Bible were written on your faces, you would not need to insist so obstinately on the authority of that book ... As things are, however, all your apologies for Christianity have their roots in your lack of Christianity; with your defense plea you inscribe your own bill of indictment."
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"A book should long for pen, ink, and writing-table: but usually it is pen, ink, and writing-table that long for a book. That is why books are so negligible nowadays."
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"A reader is doubly guilty of bad manners against an author when he praises his second book at the expense of his first (or vice versa) and then expects the author to be grateful for what he has done."
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"Well, my book is written-let it go. But if it were only to write over again there wouldn't be so many things left out. They burn in me; and they keep multiplying; but now they can't ever be said. And besides, they would require a library-and a pen warmed up in hell."
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"With a book he was regardless of time."
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"I have read your book, and I disapprove."
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"No- I cannot talk of books in a ballroom; my head is always full of something else."
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"If you have no love, do what you will - go after all the gods on earth, do all the social activities, try to reform the poor, the politics, write books, write poems - you are a dead human being. Without love your problems will increase, multiply endlessly."
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"Books are like bound dreams waiting to be released"
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"Throughout the book, she refers to herself as "the side effect," which is just totally correct. Cancer kids are essentially side effects of the relentless mutation that made the diversity of life on earth possible."
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"To give a man full knowledge of morality, I would send him to no other book than the New Testament."
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"The curious hocus-pocus of criticism I can't take seriously. It consists in squirreling up some odd phrases and then waiting for a book to come running by."
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"They must be real people. And this means that every word in every line of speech must be accurate and full of some kind of meaning which stretches not only forward in the book but stems from before in the book."
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"I don't think there is a single sentence in this whole book [East of Eden] that does not either develop character, carry on the story or provide necessary background."
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