David Gelernter Quotes

The good news (for writers) is that this means that ebooks on computers are more likely to be an enticement to buy the printed book (which is, after all, cheap, easily had, and easy to use) than a substitute for it. You can probably read just enough of the book off the screen to realize you want to be reading it on paper.

It is worth remembering that every writer begins with a naively physical notion of what art is. A book for him or her is not an expression or a series of expressions, but literally a volume, a prism with six rectangular sides made of thin sheets of papers which should include a cover, an inside cover, an epigraph in italics, a preface, nine or ten parts with some verses at the beginning, a table of contents, an ex libris with an hourglass and a Latin phrase, a brief list of errata, some blank pages, a colophon and a publication notice: objects that are known to constitute the art of writing.

Books, too, begin like the week – with a day of rest in memory of their creation. The preface is their Sunday.

I love the book. I love the feel of a book in my hands, the compactness of it, the shape, the size. I love the feel of paper. The sound it makes when I turn a page. I love the beauty of print on paper, the patterns, the shapes, the fonts. I am astonished by the versatility and practicality of The Book. It is so simple. It is so fit for its purpose. It may give me mere content, but no e-reader will ever give me that sort of added pleasure.

The book, like the bicycle, is a perfect form.

Even on the iPad or the Kindle, when reading a book, you're rewarded for pressing a button - it's almost as if it were a Pavlovian thing. There's a little action that happens. And that there's always a little pump of adrenaline that happens. But that pump is different when you're lifting a page as if it was a curtain in a theater to show you another thing.

I do not believe that all books will or should migrate onto screens: as Douglas Adams once pointed out to me, more than 20 years before the Kindle turned up, a physical book is like a shark. Sharks are old: there were sharks in the ocean before the dinosaurs. And the reason there are still sharks around is that sharks are better at being sharks than anything else is.

A good preface must be the root and the square of the book at the same time.

The future of the codex book, with pages and so forth? A platform for transmitting narratives. There are others.

For the Soul of France is masterful history, brilliantly researched, and hard to put down.

"The Cursed Wheel," which Declan [Shalvey] is starting here, is the one constant. It's a story in the backups that will go through the whole year and be the one consistent narrative. It anchors the entire [book].

Hard-covered books break up friendships. You loan a hard covered book to a friend and when he doesn’t return it you get mad at him. It makes you mean and petty. But twenty-five cent books are different.

the Real-World was a sprawling mess of a book in need of a good editor.

The computer is the way I'm making books, but I still think about the physical properties. I visualize the length of a book, the proportions of a book, in material terms.

I don't personally like the e-readers they've come up with so far. I don't fetishize books, but I do like that they're solid and unchanging.

It's always a challenge to discover the most effective first sentence, and the most effective final sentence, in a chapter for instance, and in the book as a whole.

A novel is a book with a lot of pages.

Having placed in my mouth sufficient bread for three minutes' chewing, I withdrew my powers of sensual perception and retired into the privacy of my mind, my eyes and face assuming a vacant and preoccupied expression. I reflected on the subject of my spare-time literary activities. One Beginning and one ending for a book was a thing I did not agree with. A good book may have three openings entirely dissimilar and inter-related only in the prescience of the author, or for that matter one hundred times as many endings.

It's different to read a book for pleasure than to read it analytically. In the past, I'd read Pride and Prejudice for pleasure. This time, I was really looking at the structure, the order of events, how the characters interact with each other and how the book is paced.

It seems to me the book has not just aesthetic values - the charming little clothy box of the thing, the smell of the glue, even the print, which has its own beauty. But there's something about the sensation of ink on paper that is in some sense a thing, a phenomenon rather than an epiphenomenon. I can't break the association of electric trash with the computer screen. Words on the screen give the sense of being just another passing electronic wriggle.

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.

In our day, computer technology and the proliferation of books on CD-ROM have not affected - as far as statistics show - the production and sale of books in their old-fashioned codex form.

The preface is the most important part of a book. Even reviewers read a preface.

As Tony [Blair] said in his book, Gordon [Brown] was brilliant and impossible. If he'd just been one of those things, the options are obvious.

The book shd. be a ball of light in one's hand.