Books Quote by Janet Malcolm

“T[he rules of writing] require that the personages in a tale shall be alive, except in the case of corpses, and that always the…

— Mark Twain

“High on their posthumous pedestals, the dead become hard to see. Grief, deference, and the homogenizing effects of adulation blur the details, flatten the…

— Anne Fadiman

“This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, rants, facts, contrivances, and incidents are either the product of the author’s questionable imagination…

— Penny Reid

“A book is a dead man, a sort of mummy, embowelled and embalmed, but that once had flesh, and motion, and a boundless variety…

— William Godwin

“If these pages are thick with death, think of the battlefield. Corpses in different stages of decay, the slowly dying, moments of death exist…

— Susan Griffin

“But where corpses were buried secretly, there the grass grows thick; such signs (and there are ever so many others!) may be read by…

— William T. Vollmann

“I wrote this book because I had formed a strong impression that the people currently living were paying insufficient attention to the dead.”

— Niall Ferguson

“When you're writing a whodunit, the dead body is the most important character. It's the pivot point around which the plot spins.”

— Adrianne Lee

“This is a book about notable achievements made while dead.”

— Mary Roach

“This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any…

— Shannon Hale

“Some of the dead are too useful for sympathy The past we own exists on stone and white paper.”

— Janet McAdams

“The characters and events in this book are fictitious. Any similarity to real persons, living or dead, is coincidental and not intended by the…

— Thomas Mullen