Malcolm Gladwell Quotes About Books

Quotes about: Books

• The Tipping Point is the biography of an idea, and the idea is very simple. It is that the best way to understand the emergence of fashion trends, the ebb and flow of crime waves, or, for that matter, the transformation of unknown books into bestsellers, or the rise of teenage smoking, or the phenomena of word of mouth, or any number of the other mysterious changes that mark everyday life is to think of them as epidemics. Ideas and products and messages and behaviors spread just like viruses do.

  Malcolm Gladwell

  Fashion, Teenage, Book

• What do we tell our children? Haste makes waste. Look before you leap. Stop and think. Don't judge a book by its cover. We believe that we are always better off gathering as much information as possible and spending as much time as possible in deliberation.

  Malcolm Gladwell

  Children, Believe, Book

  "It pays to trust your gut" by Daniel Terdiman, www.wired.com. January 7, 2005.

• The conventional explanation for Jewish success, of course, is that Jews come from a literate, intellectual culture. They are famously "the people of the book." There is surely something to that. But it wasn't just the children of rabbis who went to law school. It was the children of garment workers. And their critical advantage in climbing the professional ladder wasn't the intellectual rigor you get from studying the Talmud. It was the practical intelligence and savvy you get from watching your father sell aprons on Hester Street.

  Malcolm Gladwell

  Children, Father, Book

  Malcolm Gladwell (2008). “Outliers: The Story of Success”, p.230, Penguin UK

• Success is deeply rooted in time and place. You may have the drive to read tons of books on biology. But if there are no books on biology in your library, and the library is never open, your drive is meaningless.

  Malcolm Gladwell

  Book, Library, May

  Source: www.washingtonpost.com

• A book, I was taught long ago in English class, is a living and breathing document that grows richer with each new reading.

  Malcolm Gladwell

  Book, Reading, Long Ago

• My highest compliment is when someone comes up to me to say, "My 14-year-old daughter, or my 12-year-old son read your book and loved it." I cannot conceive of a greater compliment than that - to write something that as an adult I find satisfying, but also that manages to reach a curious 13- or 14-year-old.

  Malcolm Gladwell

  Daughter, Book, Writing

  Goodreads interview, www.goodreads.com. December, 2008.

• If you think success is about so many more things and is so much more arbitrary, then you can be much more open to the idea that you can be Ben Fountain and publish your great book at forty-nine.

  Malcolm Gladwell

  Book, Thinking, Ideas

  "The Rumpus Interview With Malcolm Gladwell". Interview with Stephen Elliott, therumpus.net. January 22, 2009.

• David Epstein, the author of the best book on athletics in recent memory - "The Sports Gene" - wrote to me to say that he thinks I'm being overly generous. He points out that, for years, there used to be an "all-star challenge" on television, in which the best professional athletes from a variety of sports competed in a kind of makeshift decathlon.

  Malcolm Gladwell

  Sports, Stars, Memories

  "Usain Bolt, a Collapse, and an Epic Beer Mile". Interview with Nicholas Thompson, www.newyorker.com. August 27, 2015.

• I don't really collect books. I tend to lose interest in them the minute I've read them, so most of the books I've read are left in airplanes and hotel rooms.

  Malcolm Gladwell

  Book, Airplane, Rooms

• I write my books to challenge my own feelings and theories. Perhaps most surprising was what I learned about rice farming. It was really interesting to think of how different Asian and Western cultures are as a result of the kinds of agricultural practices that our ancestors used for thousands of years. The life of a Chinese peasant in the Middle Ages was so dramatically different from the life of a European peasant - night and day different.

  Malcolm Gladwell

  Book, Writing, Night

• I always resist seeing my own personal motivation in my work, but I guess it must be there on some level. And I do feel very much that my life follows the kinds of things I talk about in my books. I've always thought of myself as an insanely lucky person, so perhaps the success of my first two books led me to want to examine this phenomenon on some unconscious level.

  Malcolm Gladwell

  Motivation, Book, Two

  Goodreads Interview, www.goodreads.com. December, 2008.

• The iPod is clearly a tipping point (and I'm not quite sure it is a wholly positive development), because it is a revolution in the way that we consume creative property, which I would call art. It has radically changed the relationship between the artist and the audience, how money changes hands, and how much money changes hands. Music was the first, and books are coming next. The Kindle or some form of electronic book is clearly inevitable, and it will massively reshape how books are sold, who pays for them, and how they're consumed. It is going to be really fascinating.

  Malcolm Gladwell

  Art, Book, Hands

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