This was published in the October-November 2013 issue of Books & More magazine:
BOOKMARKS
Quotes from books, quotes by writers... to inspire, influence, and induce a new way of thinking/RESEARCHED AND COMPILED BY RAMESH PRABHU
"People tell me, Don't you care what they've done to your book? I
tell them, they haven't done anything to my book. It's right there on
the shelf. They paid me and that's the end of it."
— James M. Cain,
author of
The Postman Always Rings Twice, Double Indemnity, and other hard-boiled novels, on why he didn't bother to watch the films based on his books, in an interview with
The Paris Review (from
The Paris Review Interviews, Vol. 1)
*
"Dear Marjane! Never invest in your looks! Invest in your brain."
— Graphic novelist Marjane Satrapi, author of Persepolis, recalling her mother's advice to her, in the introduction to The Best American Nonrequired Reading 2009
*
"Why is it that people now spend less time
preparing food from scratch and more time reading about cooking or
watching cookery programmes on television?"
— The "cooking paradox", as
outlined by Michael Pollan in Cooked: A Natural History of Transformation, quoted in The Economist
*
"A family's photograph album is generally about the extended family — and, often, is all that remains of it."
— Susan Sontag in On Photography, which was first published in 1977
*
"I am fully aware that there are those who say
the term 'empowerment' is outdated and overdone. I strongly disagree.
The people who think it's overdone are those who possess the most power.
Easy for them to say."
— Lois P. Frankel, in Nice Girls Don't Get the Corner Office: 101 Unconscious Mistakes Women Make that Sabotage Their Careers
*
"Lots of animals, particularly apes, use
objects; but what sets us apart from them is that we make tools before
we need them, and once we have used them we keep them to use again."
—
Neil MacGregor, director of the British Museum, in his modern classic, A History of the World in 100 Objects
*
Once people start reading books on devices,
they find that all the things that they worried about don't turn out to
be true, and that they're actually perfectly comfortable with them."
—
Publishing consultant Mike Shatzkin, in Vanity Fair's How A Book Is Born: The Making of The Art of Fielding, by Keith Gessen, which is available only as an e-book
*
"The good writers touch life often. The
mediocre ones run a quick hand over her. The bad ones rape her and leave
her for the flies."
— "Faber" to "Guy Montag", the fireman who burns
books, in Fahrenheit 451, by Ray Bradbury
*
“Any life devoted to
reading is extraordinarily rich and rewarding, but it can certainly
become an unbalanced life. Because of all the time I spend devoted to
reading, here are some things that I've, perforce, given up: gardening,
cooking, Rollerblading, and cleaning house. But in return I've gotten so
much gratification from the life that reading has allowed me to live.”
—
Nancy Pearl in the introduction to More Book Lust, the sequel to her
massively popular Book Lust, which was first published in 2003
*
"People
do awful things to each other. But it's worse in places where everybody
is kept in the dark."
— "Veteran war photographer George Guthrie", in
Night and Day, Tom Stoppard's 1978 play about foreign correspondents
