Great Book Quotes - Page 4

• Michel Houellebecq is the most interesting, provocative and important European novelist of my generation. Period. No one else comes close. He has written two or maybe three great books, and his latest, The Map and the Territory, is one of them.

  Bret Easton Ellis

  Book, Two, Interesting

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• A towering theoretical achievement of exceptional elegance...Like most great books, Sociobiology is unpedantic, lucid, and eminently accessible.

  Pierre L. van den Berghe

  Book, Achievement, Elegance

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• Most great books have been about striving in some sense. In a sense, money is the great topic of the novel. You couldn't necessarily say that about poetry.

  Chad Harbach

  Book, Topics, Strive

  Source: therumpus.net

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• Great books are readable anyway. Dickens is readable. Jane Austen is readable. John Updike's readable. Hawthorne's readable. It's a meaningless term. You have to go the very extremes of literature, like Joyce's "Finnegan's Wake," before you get a literary work that literally unreadable.

  Julian Barnes

  Book, Literature, Hawthorne

  "Conversation: Julian Barnes, Winner of the 2011 Man Booker Prize". "Art Beat" with Jeffrey Brown, www.pbs.org. November 8, 2011.

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• We understand a person with problems, someone who is wrong about a lot of things in his or her life, who makes messes. We don't understand someone who is constantly right, who is only felled by Kryptonite. Chuck Klosterman had a pretty great book about this whole thing - I Wear The Black Hat - that came out last year and which I greatly enjoyed.

  Tod Goldberg

  Book, Years, Kryptonite

  Source: therumpus.net

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• With the Holocaust - I wonder if a lot of Jewish writers of my generation have felt this way - it feels really intimidating to approach it. I feel like so many writers who have either lived through it firsthand or were part of that generation where they were closer to the people who were in it have written so beautifully about it, so there's no lack of great books about it

  Molly Antopol

  Book, People, Holocaust

  Source: therumpus.net

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• There's a whole slew of wonderful speculation of flying in a fanciful way. Gulliver is one of the central examples; Swift has the hum of Arabian Nights in his ear with Gulliver's Travels. The difference is in scale - Gulliver as a kind of Sinbad kind of figure, the way he is picked up and carried. Just to finish up with Scheherazade, I do think that The Arabian Nights could be considered as a great book on women's position in the world.

  Marina Warner

  Book, Night, Thinking

  Source: therumpus.net

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• I was very much influenced by a great book by the scholar Neil Richards called Intellectual Privacy, that [Louis] Brandeis changed his mind on the proper balance between dignity and free speech.

  Jeffrey Rosen

  Book, Intellectual, Mind

  "What Would Brandeis Do?". "Amicus" with Dahlia Lithwick, www.slate.com. June 16, 2016.

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• I'd say that [Louis] Brandeis practiced a kind of a "living originalism," to use the title of Jack Balkin's great book. He said you start with the paradigm case, which in the case of the Fourth Amendment was these general warrants or writs of assistance, but you define it at a level of abstraction that you can take it into our age and make it our own.

  Jeffrey Rosen

  Book, Age, Titles

  Source: www.slate.com

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• Great books don't make great movies. There's too much information in there.

  Casey Affleck

  Book, Too Much Information, Information

  Interview with Sam Adams, www.avclub.com. June 17, 2010.

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• Most of the books that I've adapted I'm doing because I love the book and I feel like it's a great work of art in itself, and when it's a great book I feel as a director or a writer that I have a responsibility to rise to the level of the original. It makes me try to reach higher.

  James Franco

  Art, Book, Responsibility

  "Can't Stop, Won't Stop: James Franco and Pamela Romanowsky on Drugs, S&M, and The Adderall Diaries". Interview with Emily Zemler, www.esquire.com. April 13, 2016.

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• [Jimmy] Breslin's [write] really great book on Branch Rickey. And Branch Rickey himself wrote quite a lot. There's some film and kinescope from television.

  Harrison Ford

  Book, Writing, Television

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• There are some things fundamentally off about the stance of the book. And maybe that's okay; maybe every book is flawed, and great books, as flawed as they might be, articulate a moral argument that the reader then carries forward. The critique to this model is, of course, to ask: Should a book be ever so perfect that you come out of it with complete moral agreement that can be sustained?

  George Saunders

  Book, Agreement, Perfect

  Source: www.interviewmagazine.com

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• I've read the Bible. I think the Bible's a great book, but it's a novel. It's beautifully written and la-di-da, but people really took it the wrong way.

  Winona Ryder

  Book, Thinking, People

  Source: www.interviewmagazine.com

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• Wisdom is not what comes from reading great books. When it comes to understanding life, experiential learning is the only worthwhile kind, everything else is hearsay.

  Joan Erikson

  Book, Reading, Understanding

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• What holy cities are to nomadic tribes — a symbol of race and a bond of union — great books are to the wandering souls of men: they are the Meccas of the mind.

  George Edward Woodberry

  Book, Men, Race

  George Edward Woodberry (1910). “The Inspiration of Poetry”

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• We find little in a book but what we put there. But in great books, the mind finds room to put many things.

  Joseph Joubert

  Book, Reading, Mind

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• I was filled with angst in college, that I struggled with the question of my future, the meaning of my life - spoiled sheltered rich girl collides with great books and is devastated by her own banality.

  Elizabeth Kostova

  Girl, Book, College

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• Never let a day pass without looking at some perfect work of art, hearing some great piece of music and reading, in part, some great book.

  Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

  Art, Book, Reading

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• A great thing is a great book; but a greater thing than all is the talk of a great man.

  Benjamin Disraeli

  Book, Men, Great Things

  Benjamin Disraeli, Edmund Gosse, Robert Arnot (1904). “The works of Benjamin Disraeli, earl of Beaconsfield: embracing novels, romances, plays, poems, biography, short stories and great speeches”

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• Listening to people discussing a novel can be very interesting, if you've read whatever novel is being discussed. No one, it seems, ever says, "This is a great book but I didn't like it." Taking a little time to think about why this might be has been very liberating.

  Zia Haider Rahman

  Book, Thinking, People

  Source: www.guernicamag.com

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• Success is not measured by bestseller lists. Certain types of great books sell very well; other types of great books don’t sell a lot. But they’re both great.

  Po Bronson

  Book, Lists, Type

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• Books can be passed around. They can be shared. A lot of people like seeing them in their houses. They are memories. People who don't understand books don't understand this. They learn from TV shows about organizing that you should get rid of the books that you aren't reading, but everyone who loves books believes the opposite. People who love books keep them around, like photos, to remind them of a great experience and so they can revisit and say, "Wow, this is a really great book."

  Daniel Goldin

  Memories, Reading, Believe

  "Bookshop owner talks book industry, bookswapping and book love". Interview with Molly Snyder, onmilwaukee.com. September 10, 2011.

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• There's no point in making a film out of a great book. The book's already great. What's the point?

  Neil Jordan

  Book, Film, No Point

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• You’ll learn that the key to a great book is editing-grindin g, buffing, and polishing-not writing.

  Guy Kawasaki

  Book, Writing, Keys

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