My father always said, 'Never trust anyone whose TV is bigger than their book shelf' - so I make sure I read.
My father always says, ‘Never trust anyone who has a TV bigger than their bookshelf.’ So I make sure I read. Back at home, I just put up a massive bookcase and asked everyone I know and love to help me fill it with their favorite books. It’s been quite nice because I’ve learned a lot about my friends and family from what they’ve been giving me. A book says a lot about a person.
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.
I trust in the ebb and flow of the universe. I trust that life's bigger than what I can see. I trust that there is a divine order beyond my control. And I trust that no matter what happens, I will be all right.
The book of the moment often has immense vogue, while the book of the age, which comes in its company from the press, lies unnoticed; but the great book has its revenge. It lives to see its contemporary pushed up shelf by shelf until it finds its final resting-place in the garret or the auction room.
Never trust anyone who has not brought a book with them.
I'm such an old fart that I started buying books on film and TV and radio and music when, for television, the entire shelf of books was only a couple of them. You go into the '70s before you start getting books on TV that you start wanting to collect. And by the time that you get to something like the Brooks and Marsh book it's invaluable. My house got hit by lightning in 1989 and burned down. And I got more than a half dozen Brooks and Marsh books sent to me by friends immediately, as though that's what you need more than clothes or food. That's how treasured that book was.
All of us can think of a book... that we hope none of our children or any other children have taken off the shelf. But if I have the right to remove that book from the shelf - that work I abhor - then you also have exactly the same right and so does everyone else. And then we have no books left on the shelf for any of us.
Smaller than a breadbox, bigger than a TV remote, the average book fits into the human hand with a seductive nestling, a kiss of texture, whether of cover cloth, glazed jacket, or flexible paperback.
Very rarely does anyone say that the TV is better than the book.
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?
The TV audience is way bigger than a book audience, and no matter what I do, I'm always thinking if this will help people read my books.
Of course anyone who truly loves books buys more of them than he or she can hope to read in one fleeting lifetime. A good book, resting unopened in its slot on a shelf, full of majestic potentiality, is the most comforting sort of intellectual wallpaper.
If you want to know who the oppressed minorities in America are, simply look at who gets their own shelf in the bookstore. A black shelf, a women's shelf, and a gay shelf.
Whatever a writer gets paid for his book, it's never enough. I think that's true. It's hard work. But in the end, you wrote a book. It's something real and tangible that sits on a shelf forever.
Films for TV have to be much closer to the book, mainly because the objective with a TV movie that translates literature is to get the audience, after seeing this version, to pick up the book and read it themselves. My attitude is that TV can never really be any form of art, because it serves audience expectations.