A Quote by Michael Dirda
I find that the Amazon comments often are exceptionally shrewd and insightful, so I'm not going to diss them. But you don't really have any guarantees that what you're reading wasn't written out of friendship or spite.
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That's insightful, but equally insightful is what they say afterwards. The other thing that I always point out is it's one thing to talk to the candidate. It's quite another to talk to the staff, and that's when you find out what's really going on.
If you're reading a novel that was written in 1964, you'll find out more about 1964 than if you're reading a nonfiction book written in 1964 because you're hearing how language was actually used and hearing what people's actual concerns were at the beginning of the 1960s.
If I start to go around and look for stuff that's being written about me or about the band, chances are I'm not going to find what I'm looking for or what I'd want to be hearing. If I go out and look for it and it's out there, I'm really going to notice when it's not. And I'd hate to think that that would impact any decisions I'm making.
I don't hire any companies or ask any of my friends to write reviews for me on Amazon when I have a book come out so they can drive up my ratings on Amazon. I don't have a publicist.
The Communists do have a god, the Dialectic of History, which guarantees everything that they're going to do and guarantees them victory; that's why they're fanatic.
It's a comedy thriller, brilliantly written and it's full of twists and turns at every page. When I was reading it I was desperate to get to the end to find out what happens, it really hooks you.
When we have read a book or poem so often that we can no longer find any amusement in reading it by ourselves, we can still take pleasure in reading it to a companion. To him it has all the graces of novelty.
We started out on the Internet, so I've been reading what people had to say about stuff since we were getting mean comments on iFilm, before we even had our site going. People are really, really rough on the web - that's their right, that's the whole point of it - but sometimes it can be a little bit brutal.
Because, as we know, almost anything can be read into any book if you are determined enough. This will be especially impressed on anyone who has written fantastic fiction. He will find reviewers, both favourable and hostile, reading into his stories all manner of allegorical meanings which he never intended. (Some of the allegories thus imposed on my own books have been so ingenious and interesting that I often wish I had thought of them myself.)
I explained to Amazon that I don't like outlining or projecting what something's going to be. I like to allow a story to arise as I'm writing scripts. I find it horrible when I try to think of something for the plot without really being on the ground and seeing where it goes. I was really resistant to do the mini-bible. So I gave them something, but I really didn't want to do it that way.
Well, the traveling teachers do come through every few months," said the Baron. "Yes, sir, I know, sir, and they're useless, sir. They teach facts, not understanding. It's like teaching people about forests by showing them a saw. I want a proper school, sir, to teach reading and writing, and most of all thinking, sir, so people can find what they're good at, because someone doing what they really like is always an asset to any country, and too often people never find out until it's too late.
By reading the characteristic features of any man's castles in the air you can make a shrewd guess as to his underlying desires which are frustrated.
Users scan a page looking for trigger words. If they find a trigger word, they click on it but if they don’t find it, they go to search. That’s the way it works on 99% of sites, although Amazon is an exception. That’s because Amazon has done a great job of training users to know that absolutely nothing on the home page is of any use.
The older I've got the less I find myself going back and re-reading or really reading new fiction or poetry.
If there's an article about sexual assault, if there's a video about feminism on YouTube, you're going to get the most horrible, disgusting comments ever. And sometimes the comments are pornographic, and sometimes the comments are really harassing. So I think that it's kind of a difficult place for women to write sometimes.
No one, at any rate no English writer, has written better about childhood than Dickens. In spite of all the knowledge that has accumulated since, in spite of the fact that children are now comparatively sanely treated, no novelist has shown the same power of entering into the child's point of view.
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