Samuel Johnson Quotes

So, for a book set in 2006, Open City evades certain markers, while it embraces certain others. Julius doesn't use a smartphone, and he doesn't discuss contemporary US politics in any fine detail.

We're in a world of truncated sentences, soundbites and Twitter... [Language] is being eroded -- it's changing. Our expressiveness and our ease with some words is being diluted so that the sentence with more than one clause is a problem for us, and the word of more than two syllables is a problem for us.

There is interest in a crime-based reality show. With my novels, we are now editing the second book in a series about a defense lawyer whose name is Samantha Brinkman. And I am reviewing speaking engagement opportunities.

Great books are written for Christianity much oftener than great deeds are done for it. City libraries tell us of the reign of Jesus Christ but city streets tell us of the reign of Satan.

I've signed peoples' parole cards at book signings and it's very touching.

Jake went in, aware that he had, for the first time in three weeks, opened a door without hoping madly to find another world on the other side. A bell jingled overhead. The mild, spicy smell of old books hit him, and the smell was somehow like coming home.

Camerado! This is no book; who touches this touches a man.

When I lived in the city, I had learned to close my door against a lot of the noise, but when I open my door here, I'm not opening into the possibility that I'm going to run into somebody or be faced with a hundred choices about what I'm going to do, or which cafe I'm going to go to, or which way to distract myself.

Whether one talks well depends very much upon whom he has to talk to.

The Tibetan Book of Living and Dying says that death is the graduation ceremony, while living is just a long course in learning and preparing for the next journey. If we acknowledge death as the beginning, then how can we fear it?

Kansas City Lightning succeeds as few biographies of jazz musicians have. . . This book is a magnificent achievement; I could hardly put it down.

After my first novel, my mother said to me, 'Why don't you make your writing more funny? You're so funny in person.' Because my first novel was rather dark. And I don't know, but something about what she said was true. 'Yes, why don't I?' Maybe I was afraid to be funny in the writing. But since then, seven books later, almost everything I've done has a comedic edge to it.

I don't know why the world has changed so much that writers are now expected to appear in public and talk about their work. It's something I find very difficult. And yet, one does have some sense of responsibility towards one's publishers, to the people trying to sell the book.

My book would come out in one language, then it would come out in another language, then it would come out in One City, One Read, and I was always being called away from my desk.

The art of declamation has been sinking in value from the moment that speakers were foolish enough to publish, and hearers wise enough to read.

The first sentence of a book is a handshake, perhaps an embrace. Style and personality are irrelevant. They can be formal or casual. They can be tall or short or fat or thin. They can obey the rules or break them. But they need to contain a charge. A live current, which shocks and illuminates.

At last she shut the book sharply, lay back, and drew a deep breath, expressive of the wonder which always marks the transition from the imaginary world to the real world.

My life is split in three parts; I don't know the percentage. One could be called "chess" - the Kasparov Chess Foundation, promoting the game, training young players, playing on the internet, sometimes exhibitions. The second area would be "writing" - books, articles, Twitter, Facebook. And then "political activity" - fighting for human rights and democracy, so TV, interviews, speeches.

Conversation is an art in which a man has all mankind for his competitors, for it is that which all are practising every day while they live.

Ask yourself whether our language is complete--whether it was so before the symbolism of chemistry and the notation of the infinitesimal calculus were incorporated in it; for these are, so to speak, suburbs of our language. (And how many houses or streets does it take before a town begins to be a town?) Our language can be seen as an ancient city: a maze of little streets and squares, of old and new houses, and of houses with additions from various periods; and this surrounded by a multitude of new boroughs with straight regular streets and uniform houses.

Those of us who are writers and have to perform to communities that aren't used to coming to book events, I would recommend taking some theater.

Thus I progressed on the surface of life, in the realm of words as it were, never in reality. All those books barely read, those friends barely loved, those cities barely visited, those women barely possessed! I went through the gestures out of boredom or absent-mindedness. Then came human beings; they wanted to cling, but there was nothing to cling to, and that was unfortunate--for them. As for me, I forgot. I never remembered anything but myself.

I would never read a book if it were possible for me to talk half an hour with the man who wrote it.