Using Hard Timesideas For Books Quotes

People keep asking me, "Where do you get the ideas for your books?"
From the worst moments in my life.
I call that "literature through disaster." I got the whole Tales from Earth's End Saga that way, as well as Numenon. Don't be afraid of the hard times. ~ Sandy Nathan

But I knew how to visit the creatures who would never be sighted in the zoos or the museum or the woods. They were waiting for me in books and in stories. ~ Neil Gaiman

The very idea of a library for me is bound to my mother and father and includes the history of my own metamorphosis through books, fictions that are no less part of me than much of my own history. ~ Siri Hustvedt

Some people act as though art that is for a mass audience is not good art, and I think this has been a very negative thing. I know that I have wanted very much to write books that are accessible to the widest audience possible. ~ Bell Hooks

I sometimes longed for someone who, like me, had not adjusted perfectly with his age, and such a person was hard to find; but I soon discovered cats, in which I could imagine a condition like mine, and books, where I found it quite often. ~ Julio Cortazar

I absolutely don't buy into the current mania for tidiness and decluttering. For a writer, piles of papers and notes are a fertile field. Keep all those books you read in college, or had certainly meant to read. Keep all those clothes that last fit during the Carter administration. Or give them away. It's for you to choose. You has value. ~ Anne Lamott

ust suppose that Hitler had won the war, wiped out all the Jews and convinced his people that there really was such a thing as a master race. The history books start to be changed, and, a hundred years later, his succesors manage to wipe out all the Indians. Three hundred years later and the Blacks have been eliminated too. It takes five hundred years, but, finally, the all powerful war machine succeeds in erasing the oriental race from the face of the earth as well. The history books speak of remote battles waged against barbarians, but no one reads too closely. because it's of no importance.
Two thousand years later after the birth of Narzism, in a bar in Tokyo, a city that has been inhabited for five centuries now by tall, blue eyed people, Hanz and Fritz are enjoying a beer. At one point, Hans looks as Fritz and asks "Fritz do you think it was always like this?"
"What?" asks Fritz
"The world"
"Of course the world was always like this isn't that what we were taught?"
"Of course I dont know what made me ask such a stupid question," says hans. They finish their beer, talk about other things and forget the question entirely. ~ Paulo Coelho

And, hey. You. Thanks for being the kind of person who likes to pick up a book. That's a genuinely great thing. I met a librarian recently who said she doesn't read because books are her job and when she goes home, she just wants to switch off. I think we can agree that that's as creepy as hell. Thank you for seeking out stories, the kind that take place in your brain. ~ Max Barry

We stopped to browse in the cases, and now that William - with his new glasses on his nose - could linger and read the books, at every title he discovered he let out exclamations of happiness, either because he knew the work, or because he had been seeking it for a long time, or finally because he had never heard it mentioned and was highly excited and titillated. In short, for him every book was like a fabulous animal that he was meeting in a strange land. ~ Umberto Eco

Governments and fashions come and go but Jane Eyre is for all time. ~ Jasper Fforde

Happiness is not always reading the same page in the same book. Sometimes it is just wanting to hold the others book for them to read. ~ Faye Hall

Jill showed friend Kay the cute white mice.
They liked to run races for cheese.
Mice were lots of fun to play with.
Jill said, "Take Poopsie, the male one, please! ~ Melinda K. Trotter

How could I, who loved life so intensely, have let myself be entangled for so long in that balderdash of books and paper blackened with ink! ~ Nikos Kazantzakis

Despite her apparent freedom, her life consisted of endless hours spent waiting for a miracle, for true love, for an adventure with the same romantic ending she had seen in films and read about in books. A writer once said that it is not time that changes man, nor knowledge; the only thing that can change someone's mind is love. What nonsense!
The person who wrote that clearly knew only one side of the coin.
Love was undoubtedly one of the things capable of changing a person's whole life, from one moment to the next. But there was the other side of the coin, the second thing that could make a human being take a totally different course from the one he or she had planned; and that was called despair. Yes, perhaps love really could transform someone, but despair did the job more quickly. ~ Paulo Coelho

When Suzie introduced Helen, she told the audience that one of the best things about books is that they are an interactive art form: that while the author may describe in some detail how a character looks, it is the reader's imagination that completes the image, making it his or her own. "That's why we so often don't like movies made from books, right?" Suzie said. "We don't like someone else's interpretation of what we see so clearly." She talked, too, about how books educate and inspire, and how they soothe the soul-"like comfort food without the calories," she said. She talked about the tactile joys of reading, the feel of a page beneath one's fingers; the elegance of typeface on a page. She talked about how people complain that they don't have time to read, and reminded them that if they gave up half an hour of television a day in favor of reading, they could finish twenty-five books a year. "Books don't take time away from us," she said. "They give it back. In this age of abstraction, of multitasking, of speed for speed's sake, they reintroduce us to the elegance-and the relief!-of real, tick-tock time. ~ Elizabeth Berg

I had been self-publishing for a number of years at that stage and selling my books at markets around Melbourne - little pocket books. I'd make them for 10 cents and sell them for a dollar. But I knew there was an audience who loved silly stuff so I just kept plugging away. ~ Andy Griffiths

We [psychonauts] are all going to go into the books as pioneers, because it's too early for us to be anything else. There's no map, no finished database, just anecdotes of the crazy, crazy stuff that goes on. That's why it's so important to try and share [our stories]. ~ Terence McKenna

Cornelius rose. He dried his eyes. For his spirit and will were waterproof. ~ Phil Bildner

Perhaps talk of counters turned the boy's thoughts to his father's glove shop. His father would have accounted for all his transactions using the tokens. They were hard and round and very thin, made of copper or brass. There were counters for one pair of gloves, and for two pairs, and three and four and five. But there was no counter for zero. No counters existed for all the sales that his father did not close. ~ Daniel Tammet

Plyometrics. Hate them. Enough already. Jumping around, using your own body weight is so hard to me. How did we do it as kids? ~ Sarah Shahi

His hand was a claw, sharp enough to open her. She would be like all the others - Ruta Badowski, in her broken dancing shoes. Tommy Duffy, still with the dirt of his last baseball game under his nails. Gabriel Johnson, taken on the best day of his life. Or even Mary White, holding out for a future that never arrived. She'd be like all those beautiful, shining boys marching off to war, rifles at their hips and promises on their lips to their best girls that they'd be home in time for Christmas, the excitement of the game showing in their bright faces. They'd come home men, heroes with adventures to tell about, how they'd walloped the enemy and put the world right side up again, funneled it into neat lines of yes and no. Black and white. Right and wrong. Here and there. Us and them. Instead, they had died tangled in barbed wire in Flanders, hollowed by influenza along the Western Front, blown apart in no-man's-land, writhing in trenches with those smiles still in place, courtesy of the phosgene, chlorine, or mustard gas. Some had come home shell-shocked and blinking, hands shaking, mumbling to themselves, following orders in some private war still taking place in their minds. Or, like James, they'd simply vanished, relegated to history books no one bothered to read, medals put in cupboards kept closed. Just a bunch of chess pieces moved about by unseen hands in a universe bored with itself. ~ Libba Bray

For me, wellbehaved books with neat plots and worked-out endings seem somewhat quaint in the face of the largely incoherent reality of modern life; and then again fiction, at least as I write it and think of it, is a kind of religious meditation in which language is the final enlightenment, and it is language, in its beauty, its ambiguity and its shifting textures, that drives my work. ~ Don DeLillo

First, people don't read novels off screens, and they don't have a tendency to shell out real money for books when they don't retain anything physically for their money. ~ Jack L. Chalker

And now if you'll excuse me, I should like to finish my book, alone, without the presence of a single ringleted girl to disrupt me. If you should come for me at dinner and find me in my chair, gone to the angels at last, you shall know that I died alone, which is to say in a state of utter bliss. ~ Libba Bray

Books were the window from which I looked out of a rather meager and decidedly narrow room onto a rich and wonderful universe. I loved the look and feel of books, even the smell ... Libraries were treasure houses. I always entered them with a slight thrill of disbelief that all their endless riches were mine for the borrowing. ~ Zilpha Keatley Snyder

She read novels. One book after another, sometimes at the rate of one a day, for a solid year. An acceptable form of escape that didn't leave a hangover. ~ Wendy Wax

As for what concerns me in particular I have only in my life carried to an extreme what you have not dared to carry halfway, and what's more, you have taken your cowardice for good sense, and have found comfort in deceiving yourselves. So that perhaps, after all, there is more life in me than in you. Look into it more carefully! Why, we don't even know what living means now, what it is, and what it is called? Leave us alone without books and we shall be lost and in confusion at once. We shall not know what to join on to, what to cling to, what to love and what to hate, what to respect and what to despise. We are oppressed at being men--men with a real individual body and blood, we are ashamed of it, we think it a disgrace and try to contrive to be some sort of impossible generalised man. We are stillborn, and for generations past have been begotten, not by living fathers, and that suits us better and better. We are developing a taste for it. Soon we shall contrive to be born somehow from an idea. ~ Fyodor Dostoyevsky

The idea, of course, might be to let them know that writing needn't be hard work; the hard work is getting out of bed in the morning or at noon; the hard work is looking at people's faces in long supermarket lines; the hard work is working for somebody else who is making money using your life's hours and years. ~ Charles Bukowski

Go and tell," I whispered to him. There was little voice left in me, but I whispered it firmly. Then I took the Gospel from the table, the Russian translation, and showed him John, chapter 12, verse 24:
"Verily, verily, I say unto you, except a corn of wheat fall into the ground and die, it abideth alone: but if it die, it bringeth forth much fruit." I had read this verse just before he came.
He read it.
"True," he said, and smiled bitterly. "Yes, in these books," he said, after a pause, one finds all sorts of terrible things. It is easy to shove them under someone's nose. Who wrote them, were they human beings?"
"The Holy Spirit wrote them," I said.
"Its easy for you to babble," he smiled again, but this time almost hatefully. I again took the book, opened it to a different place, and showed him the Epistle to the Hebrews, chapter 10, verse 31. He read: "It is a fearful thing to fall into the hands of the living God."
He read it and threw the book aside. He even began trembling all over.
"A fearful verse," he said. "You picked a good one, I must say. ~ Fyodor Dostoyevsky

As someone who has to teach for a living, I shouldn't be saying this, but the planet can do quite well without books. ~ Ruth Ozeki

Most of them won't have a book in the house, though, when they have to, they'll talk about the latest book that's selling millions of copies around the world. Our readers may not read books, but they are fascinated by great eccentric painters who sell for billions. ~ Umberto Eco