Jami Attenberg Quotes

Any book which inspires us to lead a better life is a good book.

Now, almost twenty years since my last job in book publishing, I know that there are far more socially inept people in book than in magazine publishing. At the time, however, I just didn't feel I was enough: smart enough, savvy enough, well read enough, educated enough, charming enough. Much of this was probably because I was very naive, and didn't really know how to behave in an office. This made me a terrible assistant, which in turn made me a terrible junior book editor.

Snoop is a tour de force! It’s one of the smartest and most original books I’ve come across in a long time. I devoured it and then rushed over to clean up my desk and change my iPod playlist.

It took years after I’d graduated from Amherst to realize that people were actually far more complicated and interesting than books, that almost everyone else suffered the same secret fears and inadequacies as I, and that feeling alone and inferior was actually the great valent bond between us all. I wish I’d been smart enough to understand that when I was an adolescent.

In Milly Barranger, Margaret Webster has found the perfect biographer. In Margaret Webster, Milly Barranger has found her perfect subject. She brings to vivid life a fascinating and important theater figure whose public and private lives were of equal interest. In this carefully researched book, Webster's colleagues, lovers, and friends shine as brightly as she did. I wish she were here to read it.

If you want to read a perfect book there is only one way: write it.

The educated man pictures a horde of submen, wanting only a day's liberty to loot his house, burn his books, and set him to work minding a machine or sweeping out a lavatory. 'Anything,' he thinks, 'any injustice, sooner than let that mob loose.' He does not see that since there is no difference between the mass of rich and poor, there is no question of setting the mob loose. The mob is in fact loose now, and--in the shape of rich men--is using its power to set up enormous treadmills of boredom, such as 'smart' hotels.

A cult classic... both a celebration of the unlimited potential of the comic book form, and a perfect melding of inspiring, iconoclastic imaginations.

Every book is good to read which sets the reader in a working mood.

I write to entertain. When people read one of my books I want them to finish with a smile on their faces, feeling a little bit better about themselves and the people in their lives.

A children's book is the perfect place where young readers can understand the world because they can take a deep breath and look at it and imagine and contemplate while they're looking at.

A fantastic, gleeful, chrome-plated-slick debut of a novel. In Jonathan Chase, Markham has created the perfect cliche-shattering super spy while honoring the progenitors. Dangerously sharp, and genuinely fun-and very, very, very smart. I want more books like this. I want more books from the mind of Mr. Markham!

When I studied with Nicholas Ray he was always telling us, "If you want to make films, watch a lot of films, but don't just watch films, go take a walk, look at the sky, read a book about meteorology, look at the design of people's shoes. Because all of them are part of filmmaking." So I thought, perfect! That's a good job for me.

Do you know what they call people who hoard books? Smart.

Your people smarts will prove ten times more valuable than all the book smarts you can't get.

The public does not like you to mislead or represent yourself to be something you're not. And the other thing that the public really does like is the self-examination to say, you know, I'm not perfect. I'm just like you. They don't ask their public officials to be perfect. They just ask them to be smart, truthful, honest, and show a modicum of good sense.

For a woman to be able to dominate and also be feminine and soft, that's a talent. And its not all about appearance. A woman who has a brain, who is street-smart and book-smart, that woman is very, very sexy to me.

With humor you have so many options with topics and length, I mean I can write humor essays in books now and they can be as long as I want them to be.

I read the paper every day. There are certain subjects that will catch my attention. I have an entire file of articles. Of course I make up the story, especially since most criminals are not very smart and fictional crime must be clever. I have to make sure the story I am telling is interesting and realistic. In this book I went on line and found out the manners of codes. I thought it interesting to use them as a jumping off point.

Cecil Castellucci is writing Shade, who is the perfect writer for it. I love her young adult stuff, and it's pretty hardcore and visceral, so I knew she was going to bring that to the book.

The way I feel about every book is this: you don't finish it, you abandon it. All of my books have in some sense failed, otherwise I wouldn't write another one. If I wrote the perfect book, I wouldn't have to write again, and I wouldn't want to. That's not true for everyone, but it's true for me. I could walk away then. But so far I haven't managed to do it.

[John Larroquette] is one of the smartest men I've ever met. He's very cerebral and book-smart. He would say things and I'd have to go look them up, thinking, "That can't be true!" And they'd be true.

About as close you can get to the perfect cerebral thriller: searingly smart, ridiculously funny, and fast as hell... I defy anybody to read the first page and not keep going to the last.

In his anti-Darwinian book... (and eponymously named The Neck of the Giraffe ), Francis Hitching tells the story... "The need to survive by reaching ever higher for food is, like so many Darwinian explanations of its kind, little more than a post hoc speculation." Hitching is quite correct, but he rebuts a fairy story that Darwin was far too smart to tell - even though the tale later entered our high school texts as a "classic case" nonetheless.

She's kind of a walking poem, she's this perfect beauty...but at the same time very deep, very smart.