A Quote by Martin Laird

Books that talk about 'contemplation' often seem to have been written on Jupiter. This one is a sterling exception. — © Martin Laird
Books that talk about 'contemplation' often seem to have been written on Jupiter. This one is a sterling exception.
A lot of the books that have been written about Silicon Valley are really good. Michael Malone's books are incredible. I think his 'Infinite Loop' is the best book that's been written about Apple.
But this is that which will dignify and exalt knowledge: if contemplation and action be more nearly and straitly conjoined and united together than they have been: a conjunction like unto that of the highest planets, Saturn, the planet of rest and contemplation, and Jupiter, the planet of civil society and action.
Smart people often talk trash about happiness and worse than trash about books on happiness, and they have been doing so for centuries - just as long as other people have been pursuing happiness and writing books about it.
There have been more books alone written about Hamlet than have been written about the Bible.
When we talk about novels, we don't often talk about imagination. Why not? Does it seem too first grade? In reviews, you read about limpid prose, about the faithful reproduction of consciousness, about moral heft, but rarely about the power of pure, unadulterated imagination.
My books are written from the heart, to entertain: they're books I would like to read. Because of that, when I meet people who like them, we have so much to talk about!
Every one of my books is written from the viewpoint of cops, with the exception of my book Killer on the Road, which is written from the viewpoint of a serial killer.
Only idiots or snobs ever really thought less of 'genre books' of course. There are stupid books and there are smart books. There are well-written books and badly written books. There are fun books and boring books. All of these distinctions are vastly more important than the distinction between the literary and the non-literary.
When we talk about good books, we often talk about good sentences, but what we rarely talk about is reader pleasure. Yet it is reader pleasure that is going to make a book break out into the kind of success that makes it into a household name.
It's disheartening that people think that Donald Sterling is the outlier and that he's the exception and not the rule.
But it's never just been the journals that have made the difference, I don't think. It's also the way the students are with one another . . . the way they talk about books and authors and themselves. Not just their problems, but their passions too. The way they form a little society and discuss whatever matters to them. Books light the fire-whether it's a book that's already written, or an empty journal that needs to be filled in.
I get really frustrated during a crisis when I go through all the cable channels and find - very often with the exception of CNN - that I'm not watching news at all. You think, 'Well, God... there are talk shows, talk shows, talk shows and everyone is an expert!'
I get really frustrated during a crisis when I go through all the cable channels and find - very often with the exception of CNN - that I'm not watching news at all. You think, 'Well, God... there are talk shows, talk shows, talk shows and everyone is an expert!
One of my great experiences in life was to be interviewed on a late-night talk show by a guy named Tom Snyder. He was interviewing me on a book I had written on the New Testament of the Bible called Rescuing the Bible from Fundamentalism, and we talked about the dating of the books of the New Testament, and I said, "Well, the consensus is that the gospels were written some forty to seventy years after the crucifixion." And he stopped me and said, "Wait a minute, Bishop, that means they couldn't have been written by eyewitnesses."
I wonder if Karl Ove Knausgård would've written the same books today had been using Twitter. It wasn't around when he was writing those books. Those books were written during the age of the blog, with its big verbiage. The landscape has completely changed today.
Because books are written by individuals, it has often made knowledge seem like the product of individuals, even though everybody has always understood that individuals are working within the social network.
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