"I seek in the reading of books, only to please myself, by an honest diversion."
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Book quotes (page 275 of 1049)
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"And one might therefore say of me that in this book I have only made up a bunch of other people's flowers, and that of my own I have only provided the string that ties them together."
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"I want to be seen here in my simple, natural, ordinary fashion, without straining or artifice; for it is myself that I portray... I am myself the matter of my book."
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"Painting myself for others, I have painted my inward self with colors clearer than my original ones. I have no more made my book than my book has made me--a book consubstantial with its author, concerned with my own self, an integral part of my life; not concerned with some third-hand, extraneous purpose, like all other books."
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"Books are a languid pleasure."
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"Nay, what is worse, perhaps turn poet, which, they say, is an infectious and incurable distemper."
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"Oh Senor" said the niece. "Your grace should send them to be burned (books), just like all the rest, because it's very likely that my dear uncle, having been cured of the chivalric disease, will read these and want to become a shepherd and wander through the woods and meadows singing and playing and, what would be even worse, become a poet, and that, they say, is an incurable and contagious disease."
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"I am grateful for the 30 years of my work and the way it has influenced humanity, especially all the books that became international bestsellers and were translated into 37 different languages, which means they have gone all around the world."
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"All my book are my favorites."
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"If you hold a beautiful flower in your hand, you can write a whole book about it. However, you are still just you perceiving and experiencing it from your own point of view."
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"Every time there's a revolution, it comes from somebody reading a book about revolution. David Walker wrote a book and Nat Turner did his thing."
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"The present era grabs everything that was ever written in order to transform it into films, TV programs; or cartoons. What is essential in a novel is precisely what can only be expressed in a novel, and so every adaptation contains nothing but the non-essential. If a person is still crazy enough to write novels nowadays and wants to protect them, he has to write them in such a way that they cannot be adapted, in other words, in such a way that they cannot be retold."
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"I remember that the day I finished 'The Angels,' part three of 'The Book of Laughter and Forgetting', I was terribly proud of myself. I was sure that I had discovered the key to a new way of putting together a narrative."
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"He was no longer quite sure whether anything he had ever thought or felt was truly his own property, or whether his thoughts were merely a common part of the world’s store of ideas which had always existed ready-made and which people only borrowed, like books from a library."
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"Graphomania (a mania for writing books) inevitably takes on epidemic proportions when a society develops to the point of creating three basic conditions: - (1) an elevated level of general well being which allows people to devote themselves to useless activities (2) a high degree of social atomization and , as a consequence, a general isolation of individuals; (3) the absence of dramatic social changes in the nation's internal life."
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"In Tereza's eyes, books were the emblems of a secret brotherhood"
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"I guess there's a sort of cycle with writing books. There's all the researching and then the imagining and writing - which is the real job - and then there's always a period when the book comes out and you have to lift your head and venture out."
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"I always try to create conflict and drama in my books; it's the engine of the novel."
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"Many Muslims may not seek to kill the infidel, but they don't want to condemn those carrying out the holy book command."
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"I go on vacation strictly to relax - to kick back with a good book and do nothing else but read, sleep and eat."
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