I dusted my books off, placing each one—sorted alphabetically and by genre—on the shelves Dad installed. What some people might call “anal,” I’d call efficient. What good was it to have a book if you couldn’t find it when you wanted it?
The Page awaits the Inspiration even as Inspiration roams the world of man, seeking a Page upon which to unfurl itself, body and soul, bare yet clothed in immortality if not immediacy. And the gods said, “Let there be a Page, and many a Page,” an...
[...]No book can be really complete in this life; it has to end where the author's time and understanding end. There is always something left unsaid. I look forward to the life to come as the unending last chapter of all the good books I have ever re...
To become a 'good reader' one must give oneself over to a regime of concentrated pleasure. One does not set out to read a book a day (there is no necessary pleasure in that) but may spend two or three years on one book [. . .], read only portions of ...
Thais looked up from the book. For a moment he considered telling Kathel he didn't really see anything, but knew it would do no good to lie. "The book recognized me." Honesty won out. "Of course it did," Kathel said sarcastically. "Does it want a kis...
Stacks of vitamins in a soapy sink. Shh, don’t talk to me while I think. Don’t look while I stuff your yummy dinner down the drain. It was so good I couldn’t bear to eat it. Shh don’t talk, let me hold this thoughtlessness in my empty mind.
I found a hair in my Campbell’s soup, and I’d love to talk to them about advancement opportunities for bald people. My love is as bald as an eagle, only not symbolic of the largest prison system in history. Freedom Soup sounds like a good name fo...
Nature" doesn't really have intentions, per se. Nature is a drunk waking up from a weekend bender, ambling through a messy kitchen in a pair of mismatched slippers, seeing its car in the neighbor's pool and saying, "Ah good. It was dirty. Just the th...
It's not at all uncommon for a writer to get a ton of publicity for one book and then not get as much for the next one. I don't worry about that because I try to worry about the one single part of the job I can control: the writing of the book. If I ...
A lot of people say I tried to emulate Tupac, but when I look back at my career, we're very different artists. I took pages out of Pac's book, of course, and lots of other rappers - Biggie, Nas - of course you take pages out of those books, but you e...
My inspiration for writing is all the wonderful books that I read as a child and that I still read. I think that for those of us who write, when we find a wonderful book written by someone else, we don't really get jealous, we get inspired, and that'...
The idea that a book can advise a woman how to capture a man is touchingly naive. Books advising men how to capture a woman are far less common, perhaps because few men are willing to admit to such a difficulty. For both sexes, I recommend a good nov...
Now that I think about it, I was arrested in 1992. Some people may think of that as a bad thing, but I feel good about it. I chained myself to the gate of a phone book factory, a GTE factory in Los Angeles. They were using thousand-year-old trees to ...
Creativity doesn’t come from glancing quickly at your Twitter feed while in line at Starbucks. It comes from deep thought. It comes from voraciously reading books—long books that require focused attention. It comes from meaningful discourse with ...
Louise Vargo: This is my book. Louie: No, it isn't. I got it off from the dead guy, Ghost Dog. Louise Vargo: It takes place in feudal Japan. [Louie is surprised and speechless] Louise Vargo: It's a really good book. You should read it.
Kid's books should be just as good as any other books. No. They should be held to a *higher* standard than other literature for the same reason that we take extra care with children's food. The fact is, what you feed your kids is important, and that ...
This is a book for every fiddler who has realized halfway through playing an ancient Scottish air that the Ramones "I Wanna Be Sedated" is what folk music is really all about, and gone straight into it.
I see there is a good deal of grandiloquence in my book — my friends and foes have told me. I think it must be true, for there is a good deal of grandiloquence in me — and in nature also: I saw a sunset last evening that was a gross imposition up...
I endorse a lot of people - sometimes people say I endorse too many books. And my response has always been the same: If I can get one case study that can give me one good idea that I can implement for $25, or for these days one-third of that on Kindl...
It can't be supposed," said Joe. "Tho' I'm oncommon fond of reading, too." Are you, Joe?" Oncommon. Give me," said Joe, "a good book, or a good newspaper, and sit me down afore a good fire, and I ask no better. Lord!" he continued, after rubbing his ...
Does this story have a happy ending?" Bobby asked. "There is no such thing as an ending," she said. "Good things come out of bad things and bad things come out of good things, but it always continues. It's as in life. Books are life. There is just th...
