A Quote by Elizabeth Gilbert
There's no reason to keep a piece of furniture in your house that is so sacred and rare that you can't put your feet up on it and a dog can't jump up on it. Likewise, a book that sits on a shelf like a piece of porcelain, only to be admired, never to be read again, is a dead book.
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Corliss wondered what happens to a book that sits unread on a library shelf for thirty years. Can a book rightfully be called a book if it never gets read? If a tree falls in a forest and gets pulped to make paper for a book that never gets read, but there's nobody there to read it, does it make a sound?
Making your bed could be a piece of art, and writing a book could be a piece of art. You could also write a book that's not a piece of art, but that is a book, and it could be a book that was written by an artist.
The best way to get kids to read a book is to say: 'This book is not appropriate for your age, and it has all sorts of horrible things in it like sex and death and some really big and complicated ideas, and you're better off not touching it until you're all grown up. I'm going to put it on this shelf and leave the room for a while. Don't open it.
The only things I read are gossip columns. If I read three pages of a book, I'm out like a light. When I pick up the book again, I've forgotten what I've read and have to start over again. By page three, even if I've just awakened from a nine -hour nap, I fall asleep again. So if anyone gives me a book, it had better have lots of pictures.
To me, all the juice of a book is in an unpublished manuscript, and the published book is like a dead tree - just good for cutting up and building your house with.
In a way, there's nothing more intimate than a piece of jewelry. A painting is hung on somebody's wall. You put a piece of furniture in your home. But jewelry is worn by a person, so there is a fascination with the history of a piece.
A book is meant not only to be read, but to haunt you, to importune you like a lover or a parent, to be in your teeth like a piece of gristle.
You cannot pretend to read a book. Your eyes will give you away. So will your breathing. A person entranced by a book simply forgets to breathe. The house can catch alight and a reader deep in a book will not look up until the wallpaper is in flames.
Directing is a reactionary job more than a creation job. The job is to react whether it's moment one, the first time you read the script or see an article or read a book or notice something happen on the street and have an idea for a movie, and it just continues from there on in. You're just reacting to dialogue, a performance, an audition, a headache, a piece of furniture, a piece of clothing.
Sometimes you buy a book, powerfully drawn to it, but then it just sits on the shelf. Maybe you flick through it, the ghost of your original purpose at your elbow, but it's not so much rereading as re-dusting. Then one day you pick it up, take notice of the contents; your inner life realigns.
Sometimes when I pick up a book off the shelf, when I'm buying a new book to read, I'll look at all of them and they all have the exact same words inside, but I'll think that one is meant to go home with me. I'll never pick the first thing off the shelf, I'll always go one behind.
Publishing a book is a great thing, and I'm grateful, but it's also a horrible, exposing thing. Once you've published a book, you never write quite as freely again. You're aware, from that point onward, of the kinds of things critics might say about it. You're aware of the kinds of things your publishers might like and dislike about it. You're half-aware of marketing strategies - of all the stuff around the book. Whereas with your very first piece of fiction, if you're lucky, those things barely occur to you at all.
I find I'm waking up really early now, just to read. Waking up at ungodly hours. But I try to keep up, religiously. When I was a kid, it used to be a book a day. Then a book a week. Now it's like a book every two weeks. But I read every day.
What you need to know about the next piece is contained in the last piece. The place to learn about your materials is in the last use of your materials. The place to learn about your execution is in your execution. Put simply, your work is your guide: a complete, comprehensive, limitless reference book on your work.
Well, right now I'm not dead. But when I am, it's like...I don't know, I guess it's like being inside a book that nobody's reading. [...] An old one. It's up on a library shelf, so you're safe and everything, but the book hasn't been checked out for a long, long time. All you can do is wait. Just hope somebody'll pick it up and start reading.
There are so many steps you have to go through to reach a high level, so you're kind of building your own, I would say, mountain. You have to go piece by piece by piece. When you're young and really ambitious, you want to jump right up. It kind of teaches you a lesson, I would say.
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