The effort to create a work of art that is true and potentially lasting, that is the very best work of art you can create at that point in your life - a book that may only reach or move a few people but will seem to those people somehow transformativ...
It is no great art to say something briefly when, like Tacitus, one has something to say; when one has nothing to say, however, and none the less writes a whole book and makes truth into a liar - that I call an achievement.
My father is a well known artist, Ted Dyer, who has been painting for many years. Our work is very different, but growing up surrounded by paintings, paints, easels and art books does have an effect.
Be true to yourself, help others, make each day your masterpiece, make friendship a fine art, drink deeply from good books - especially the Bible, build a shelter against a rainy day, give thanks for your blessings and pray for guidance every day.
In the first book of my Discworld series, published more than 26 years ago, I introduced Death as a character; there was nothing particularly new about this - death has featured in art and literature since medieval times, and for centuries we have ha...
Does it matter that people and things Have words, Have names? If not, Why read any book? A litany of useless letters Detached from bone, muscle. Or are words the only things that make the muscle, bone, memory, movement, Person Real?
I need a kid like I need a bad heart. A pretty kid is a ticket to trouble... and I'm too old to ask for that. Shit, I haven't even booked Tommy the Face in two years. I'm turning into a jack-off idiot.
But aliens? There are TV shows about them. There are books and movies and more. The media indoctrinates you to them until people are so desensitized they don't flinch at seeing aliens on TV or having their children buy plastic versions for a quarter.
I read in a book once that a rose by any other name would smell as sweet, but I've never been able to believe it. I don't believe a rose WOULD be as nice if it was called a thistle or a skunk cabbage.
The invariable question, asked only half-mockingly of reporters by editors at the Post (and then up the hierarchical line of editors) was 'What have you done for me today?' Yesterday was for the history books, not newspapers. -- Carl Bernstein, Bob W...
the focus one finds in the grammar books is on the wrong forms, on forms detached from the underlying (or overarching) form that must be in place before any technical terms can be meaningful or alive
It is often much harder to get rid of books than to acquire them. They stick to us in that pact of need and oblivion we make with them, witnesses to a moment in our lives we will never see again. While they are still there, it is part of us.
I am not writing this book for people below the age of 18, but I see no harm in telling young people to prepare for failure rather than success, since failure is the main thing that is going to happen to them.
Jesus did many other things as well. If every one of them were written down, I suppose that even the whole world would not have room for the books that would be written.
I no longer know the author of this book, for simply stopping long enough and writing it down was where I changed from a boy with his eyes squeezed shut to a man with his eyes wide open so that the sunlight might reach my heart despite all that darkn...
Certain unique books seem to be without forerunners or successors as far as their authors are concerned. Even though they may profoundly influence the work of other writers, for their creator they're complete, not leading anywhere.
My TV’s remote control didn’t have a source of energy, so I poured coffee in it. Now I can read any book I want.
I turned the page in Slaughterhouse Five, a forbidden book at Belmont because we were too young to read about soldiers swearing and bombs dropping and bodies blowing up and war sucking.
I believe that many who find that "nothing happens" when they sit down, or kneel down, to a book of devotion, would find that the heart sings unbidden while they are working their way through a tough bit of theology with a pipe in their teeth and a p...
Books had taught me new ideas and had shown me ways of life that I would not have known about otherwise, and they offered a refuge when, like now, real life seemed too hard.
For twenty years I strove to free myself from what I retained of my education; I indulged my curiosity by reading books less to learn than to efface from my memory the ideas that had been thrust upon it.
