Words matter. These are the best Books Quotes from famous people such as Haruki Murakami, Bethenny Frankel, Terry Pratchett, John Ruskin, David Sedaris, and they’re great for sharing with your friends.
I like to read books. I like to listen to music.
My books have helped a lot of men to lose weight.
I think when people mean that Discworld books have become darker they really mean the series is growing up. In ‘The Colour of Magic’ most of the city is set alight. It’s a joke, in much the same way that the Earth is destroyed almost at the start of Douglas Adams’s ‘The Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy.’
Books are divided into two classes, the books of the hour and the books of all time.
Lovers of audio books learn to live with compromise.
I’m a feminist. The women in my books in recent years have been powerful characters and I love to see a woman with a cute bottom walking past.
Comedians take a neat situation and turn it into a mess. And in my books I do the same thing, but it’s the other way around. I like to mess around with mess. A mess is only a mess because someone tells you it is.
We will have a total chaos without books, literature, and library.
So he said ‘I’m going to chop off the bottom of one of your trouser legs and put it in a library.’ I thought ‘That’s a turn-up for the books.’
I demand that my books be judged with utmost severity, by knowledgeable people who know the rules of grammar and of logic, and who will seek beneath the footsteps of my commas the lice of my thought in the head of my style.
My priority is my books, at least at this point. What I have to do is write the narrative of this time.
It’s always hard when you’re playing someone for a lot of people out there who are going to see the movie after reading the books. There’s a communion between a reader and the writer, so people will have an idea who Sirius Black is and I might not be everyone’s idea of that.
Yes, I was inspired by Jack London and still love reading his books. Ernie Banks is another hero because I lived in Chicago for two years as a kid, and I loved that he was the Cubs’ loyal underdog and one of the first African-Americans to make that breakthrough.
Books are those faithful mirrors that reflect to our mind the minds of sages and heroes.
To read too many books is harmful.
I read Tolkien when I was 11. I read ‘The Hobbit’ and the trilogy on a road trip with my family. I identified with the nonhumans in those books, and it never occurred to me why that was.
In Russia, they have Rusalkis, and they have Selkies in Scotland, and in Fiji, you have a special mention of it. The first earliest mermaid mentioned in history books was Atargartis in Assyria, a thousand B.C… In Africa, you have Mami Wata.
I spend my happiest hours in reading Vedantic books. They are to me like the light of the morning, like the pure air of the mountains – so simple, so true, if once understood.
The reading of all good books is like a conversation with the finest minds of past centuries.
Books are but waste paper unless we spend in action the wisdom we get from thought – asleep. When we are weary of the living, we may repair to the dead, who have nothing of peevishness, pride, or design in their conversation.
Most people believe that the Creator of the universe wrote (or dictated) one of their books. Unfortunately, there are many books that pretend to divine authorship, and each makes incompatible claims about how we all must live.
The fact that books today are mostly a string of words makes it easier to forget the text. With the impact of the iPad and the future of the book being up for re-imagination, I wonder whether we’ll rediscover the importance of making texts richer visually.
One of the maddening ironies of writing books is that it leaves so little time for reading others’. My bedside is piled with books, but it’s duty reading: books for book research, books for review. The ones I pine for are off on a shelf downstairs.
I had the fortune or misfortune to learn how to read fluently starting at the age of three. So I had read maybe 150 books by the time I hit 1st grade. And I already knew that the teachers were lying to me.
My books are not really books; they’re endless chains of distraction shoved inside a cover. Many of them begin at the search box of Pub Med, an Internet database of medical journal articles.
Books are magic: you never know where they’re going to end up.
I read on my iPad when I travel. I listen to audiobooks in the car. I read books in my bedroom, where I have a comfortable couch, a lamp and two dogs to keep me warm.
Who I am, what I am, is the culmination of a lifetime of reading, a lifetime of stories. And there are still so many more books to read. I’m a work in progress.
About 75 percent of the crude oil marketed here is sold off the books, and they are doing trades that would be illegal if it was a regulated market, and of course they do not want to regulate it.
The multitude of books is making us ignorant.
All good books have one thing in common – they are truer than if they had really happened.
I want to go down in the history books with what I’ve achieved.
You don’t have to burn books to destroy a culture. Just get people to stop reading them.
I was a pretentious child. I grew up without a television. I read a lot of books and I loved Shakespeare. Still do.
It is chiefly through books that we enjoy intercourse with superior minds. In the best books, great men talk to us, give us their most precious thoughts, and pour their souls into ours.
Books are the treasured wealth of the world and the fit inheritance of generations and nations.
I was working at Nordstrom Rack, Borders Books, and I was cleaning yachts on the weekends for private parties and being a busboy. I had to break down the tables and roll the forks up in napkins. And I was still doing standup.
I’m reading a lot of different books, but I always think I have to switch it up a little bit. It’s like food – everything in moderation, same with my books, same with my reading. You read books that are good for you and you learn a lot of stuff, then you read ‘Fifty Shades of Grey,’ which is like candy.
The things I want to know are in books; my best friend is the man who’ll get me a book I ain’t read.
If I were planning to be stranded on a desert island, I wouldn’t take Freud’s books with me, because I’ve already read them all.
I like books that aren’t just lovely but that have memories in themselves. Just like playing a song, picking up a book again that has memories can take you back to another place or another time.
Yes, I don’t read books for entertainment.
I like motivational books, because I like the go-getting American spirit – your destiny is in your own hands, life is what you make it, don’t accept your limitations, jump before you’re pushed, leap before you look.
Outside books, we avoid colorful characters.
Guys that preach verse-by-verse through books of the Bible – that is just cheating. It’s cheating because that would be easy, first of all. That isn’t how you grow people. No one in the Scripture modeled that.
These days, there are many people around the world who listen to the songs that made me infamous and read the books that made me respectable.
Human beings need stories, and we’re looking for them in all kinds of places; whether it’s television, whether it’s comic books or movies, radio plays, whatever form, people are hungry for stories.
I loved reading when I grew up but did feel totally invisible because I couldn’t see myself and my life reflected in the books I was reading.
I think plays, like books, are endemic. They grow out of the soil of the writer and the place he’s writing about. I think, you just can’t move them about, you know.
You know, I don’t only play for the record books.
Be true to yourself. Make each day a masterpiece. Help others. Drink deeply from good books. Make friendship a fine art. Build a shelter against a rainy day.
I do like to work. I have my kids’ books that I do, I have movies that I do, and I model.
One of the great defects of English books printed in the last century is the want of an index.
All I’m asking for is the law that’s been on the books for the last 33 years, no public funding for abortion. We are both saying the same thing, pro-life, pro-choice. Let’s find the language that works for both of us so we can pass health care.
Blackness, any sort of difference, is not a burden. Relegating blackness or other sorts of difference to serious books that explicitly engage with issues creates a context in which it can seem like one.
The love of learning, the sequestered nooks, And all the sweet serenity of books.
If you read the poets of the 19th century in Latin America, you would see that Havana or Mexico City or Buenos Aires are incredibly modern and global cities that they were not. And eventually they became real, and they became real because people read these books and tried to live in a better world.
I changed the layout of comic books in general. When I came in, layout design wasn’t really part of what you did. It was all just panels, panels, panels. So when I came in, I thought, ‘Nah, let’s change that,’ and I designed the page.
A home without books is a body without soul.
If a secret history of books could be written, and the author’s private thoughts and meanings noted down alongside of his story, how many insipid volumes would become interesting, and dull tales excite the reader!
I really struggled, growing up, with reading and writing. I had a hard time to do that, but I was really passionate about storytelling and about books.
I have to live my books before I write them.
I look at books as being a form of activism. Sometimes they’ll show us a side of the world that we might not have known about.
I’ve had nine of my books adapted to film, and almost all were enjoyable. I’ve been very lucky with Hollywood, and look forward to more movies being adapted. But I don’t get involved in that process. I know nothing about making movies and I stay away from it and hope for the best.
I considered that I had to write stories about the people I had met, with whom I’d worked, the history of my books – just in case I up and die.
Books are funny little portable pieces of thought.
I’ve been writing all these books that have been largely autobiographical and yet, really, they don’t tell you anything about me. I just use my life story as a kind of device on which to hang comic observations. It’s not my interest or instinct to tell the world anything pertinent about myself or my family.
I like to read Bengali novels and short stories. I am not that fond of reading English books, as I don’t have a connect with it.
A man can stand a lot as long as he can stand himself. He can live without hope, without friends, without books, even without music, as long as he can listen to his own thoughts.
Unlike with the majority of library books, when you enter a term into a search engine there is no guarantee that what you will find is authoritative, accurate or even vaguely true.
I regret all of my books.
Master books, but do not let them master you. Read to live, not live to read.
I have three kids who like Harry Potter so I was sort of aware of it. You can’t really move from it: it’s on buses, in stores, it’s everywhere. One of my kids has read the books; the other two are too small but they like the movies.
I didn’t learn black history in school. I had to go find Malcolm X books.
I hate when books are written from the wrong perspective; when they’re written by adults for tweenagers. Like, do you truly remember what it’s like to be 12? No, not really.
I’ve seen a lot of people buy my books and then fall asleep on the plane soon afterwards.
For a highly motivated learner, it’s not like knowledge is secret and somehow the Internet made it not secret. It just made knowledge easy to find. If you’re a motivated enough learner, books are pretty good.
In a television interview, I said that diversity in our children’s books should include the adventures of disabled children, travellers and gipsies, LGBT teens, different cultures, classes, colours, religions. It shouldn’t be a token gesture, nor do such stories need to be ‘issue-based’.
I spent my first two years at a small all-male college in Virginia called Hampden-Sydney. That was like going to college 120 years ago. The languages, a year of rhetoric, all of the great books, Western Man courses, stuff like that.
My heart goes out to victims and survivors of the Hurricane Katrina tragedy and to their families. This disaster will go down in history books as one of the largest natural disasters in U.S. history.
One way an author dies a little each day is when his books go out of print.
What we become depends on what we read after all of the professors have finished with us. The greatest university of all is a collection of books.
When I was writing my first two books I was also freelancing and teaching and doing other odd jobs.
While I’ve worked on many topics and written many books, I have not abandoned my interest in multiple intelligences.
The first author I remember being obsessed by, actually realizing ‘I like the way he writes and I like the way he tells stories,’ was C.S. Lewis and the ‘Narnia’ books.
He who studies medicine without books sails an uncharted sea, but he who studies medicine without patients does not go to sea at all.
Buying books would be a good thing if one could also buy the time to read them in: but as a rule the purchase of books is mistaken for the appropriation of their contents.
Mum had done everything you need to educate a kid. She made me a kid who likes books and she told me about ‘Wind in the Willows’ and read it and I thought this is weird, Rat, Mole, Toad and my first ever Bolshie thought – you know about ‘The Wind in the Willows.’
In life, we like tranquility; in books, we love tension.
When you buy my books, you kind of know what you’re in for. It’s kind of self-selecting. If you have a delicate sensibility, and you’re easily grossed out, you probably will never read one of my books.
Reading time is precious. Don’t waste it. Reading bad books, or books that are wrong for a certain time in your life, can dangerously turn you off the activity altogether.
You cannot write for children They’re much too complicated. You can only write books that are of interest to them.
Very conscious of the fact that an effort was being made to destroy my mind, because I was deprived of books, deprived of any means of writing, deprived of human companionship. You never know how much you need it until you’re deprived of it.
Of all the ways of acquiring books, writing them oneself is regarded as the most praiseworthy method. Writers are really people who write books not because they are poor, but because they are dissatisfied with the books which they could buy but do not like.
My only dream is to get old and finally have time to read all the books that I’m collecting.
I have had moments where I’ve had mental-health issues and I’ve felt like yoga and meditating and reading these Buddhist self-help books actually really help.
Books, the children of the brain.
My favorite books, art pieces, films, and music, always have something jarring about them.
I’m totally into new age and self-help books. I used to work in a bookstore and that’s the section they gave me, and I got way into it. I just loved the power of positive thinking, letting yourself go.
Read some good, heavy, serious books just for discipline: Take yourself in hand and master yourself.
I am something of an aficionado of thrift stores. In my youth, I regularly searched their shelves for old books.
What excites me about picture books is the gap between pictures and words. Sometimes the pictures can tell a slightly different story or tell more about the story, about how someone is thinking or feeling.
Shooting for ‘Gandhi’ was a revelation for me. We were all given scripts and then we were asked to do our homework. I searched for books on Kasturba, but I found only two books, that’s all. So I had to rely on my own skills.
As a child I was really into fantasy books with elves and goblins and swords, and I went through a phase for a few years when I was reading endless series. But in the end I became totally fed-up with all these sub-Tolkien rip-offs because they all end up doing the same old things and there’s no rigour to it.
Next to acquiring good friends, the best acquisition is that of good books.
I have a lot of artifacts – books on witchcrafts and talismans. I have a big, big collection of original occult books from the 1800s and 1700s, and some of the oldest books on apparitions and vampires. All original printings. It’s not that I’m a crazy believer, I just find it to be amazing research material.
Books are to be distinguished by the grandeur of their topics even more than by the manner in which they are treated.
I grew up with six brothers, and I’m from Chicago, so princesses and Barbie dolls were not around the house. It was more like sports and comic books, so getting to work for Marvel is like my version of being able to be a princess.
The best way to obtain truth and wisdom is not to ask from books, but to go to God in prayer, and obtain divine teaching.
I was reading a lot of books I admired, and thought that I would like to write something like that someday.
Nine-tenths of tactics are certain, and taught in books: but the irrational tenth is like the kingfisher flashing across the pool, and that is the test of generals.
I read all types of books. I read Christian books, I read black novels, I read religious books. I read stuff like ‘Rich Dad, Poor Dad’ and ‘The Dictator’s Handbook’ and then I turned around and read science-fiction novels.
There was a gap in minority heroes in animation, books, and storytelling for me as a kid, and being a father now, I felt the responsibility I had to the next generation to create stories that allow us to wish and dream and build worlds that inspire young people who haven’t traditionally had these heroes to look up to.
We have talked long enough in this country about equal rights. It is time now to write the next chapter – and to write it in the books of law.
Sometimes people who sell books are seen as corporate salesmen, and people who sell reading are seen as literacy advocates, but you can’t really separate the two.
My mother had all these maxims – like, classy girls never chew gum, never read comic books, never get their ears pierced, never get their hair dyed.
Liberals decided it’s much better not to play outraged with me anymore. I sell lots of books that way.
We should be as careful of the books we read, as of the company we keep. The dead very often have more power than the living.
‘The Luminaries’ is such a different book to ‘The Rehearsal.’ There are only a couple of things that link the two books: there’s a certain preoccupation with looking at relationships from the outside, being shut out of human intimacy; and then there’s patterning.
Normally, I just sit in my quiet little room and do the small things that bring me pleasures. I read my books, I answer email, I write a little bit.
I don’t think that Slaughterhouse-Five was successful movie material. In fact, Vonnegut’s books mostly I don’t feel are movie material.
I read so many books when I was a kid that I didn’t even know were shaping me up.
If the government ever imposes a tax on books – and I wouldn’t put it past them – I’m in dead trouble.
Nothing bores me more than books where you read two pages and you know exactly how it’s going to come out. I want twists and turns that surprise me, characters that have a difficult time and that I don’t know if they’re going to live or die.
I like to read a lot of books and poems. Even though poems are short, I enjoy the emotions that come with them.
I read a lot for me. But I’m not one of those people who gets ‘The New York Times’ book review and runs out and buys 10 books and is done with them and passing them out to friends, you know, two weeks later.
Faulkner is a writer who has had much to do with my soul, but Hemingway is the one who had the most to do with my craft – not simply for his books, but for his astounding knowledge of the aspect of craftsmanship in the science of writing.
No, I got a GED in my 30s. My kids know that I never stop learning, and they know I love reading. I have books overflowing everywhere. I am current on today’s events and I read the paper every day, and we talk about it, so they see that appetite.
When I was in prison, I was wrapped up in all those deep books. That Tolstoy crap – people shouldn’t read that stuff.
This will never be a civilized country until we spend more money for books than we do for chewing gum.
Books and all forms of writing are terror to those who wish to suppress the truth.
I don’t have time to read books. I’ve read my share of books throughout my life, and I will continue to do so.
We’re taught Lord Acton’s axiom: all power corrupts, absolute power corrupts absolutely. I believed that when I started these books, but I don’t believe it’s always true any more. Power doesn’t always corrupt. Power can cleanse. What I believe is always true about power is that power always reveals.
I wrote ‘Yellow Submarine’ for the Beatles. I wrote the screenplay for ‘The Games,’ about the Olympic Games. I wrote ‘Love Story,’ both the novel and the screenplay. I wrote ‘RPM’ for Stanley Kramer. Plus, I wrote two scholarly books and a 400-page translation from the Latin, and I dated June Wilkinson!
One of the things I love, and I’m a voracious reader as well as a writer, is books that surprise me, that are not predictable.
Books are like a mirror. If an ass looks in, you can’t expect an angel to look out.
Running a marathon was important to me, so I found time to train for it. Writing books is also important to me, so you know what? I carve out the time.
I think literary theory has not been terribly good for English studies in a while. It’s not that theory isn’t interesting, but it isn’t about books, or the idiosyncrasies and complexities of putting language together.
I always try to create conflict and drama in my books; it’s the engine of the novel.
I don’t write the books. God writes the books and delivers the speeches.
We go to school to learn to work hard for money. I write books and create products that teach people how to have money work hard for them.
The instruction we find in books is like fire. We fetch it from our neighbours, kindle it at home, communicate it to others, and it becomes the property of all.
I used to write books and plays in my mind, but I doubt that any of them would have been above the level of the cheapest dime novel.
The only reference in my life is my life, and it’s my life experience. It’s my environment. It’s my community. I’ve not made that for books.
The man who does not read good books has no advantage over the man who cannot read them.
I thought about how I’d play a vampire for awhile because I grew up watching vampire films and reading books.
I’m a computer scientist by training. I’m also the author of three books, all of which endorse the use of biotechnology to improve the human condition. In the most recent of these, ‘The Infinite Resource,’ I talk about the power of innovation to save the world.
Many good sayings are to be found in holy books, but merely reading them will not make one religious.
The wise man reads both books and life itself.
You know, I have a lot of books on my iPad, but when I try to read them, I find myself wandering off to play games. Those are books I’m interested in. I can’t imagine what would have happened to me in college if my biology class had been on the same computer as ‘Words With Friends’ and ‘Doom.’
With a young-adult series, you need to get a lot of books out on the market quickly. Teenagers aren’t going to wait years and years for the next book.
If you read a lot of books you are considered well read. But if you watch a lot of TV, you’re not considered well viewed.
The library world is set up on this model where the library is a physical building and has a number of books and serves a geographical community.
Personally, I really enjoy sci-fi. I watch it, I read comic books, and I play video games.
When I was a kid, there were these great comic books called ‘Tales From The Crypt’ and ‘The Vault of Horror.’ They were gruesome. I discovered them in the barbershop and thought they were fabulous.
When you have mastered numbers, you will in fact no longer be reading numbers, any more than you read words when reading books You will be reading meanings.
Books are the carriers of civilization. Without books, history is silent, literature dumb, science crippled, thought and speculation at a standstill.
I have an obsession with books about kids with Asperger’s syndrome.
Television isn’t inherently good or bad. You go to a bookstore, there are how many thousands of books, but how many of those do you want? Five? Television’s the same way. If you’re going to show people stuff, television is the way to go. Words and pictures show things.
I think the government should do everything they possibly can to, to bring this crisis to an end; and that means going after BP, enforcing the laws that are on the books, and restoring the gulf to its original condition.
My mom laid the foundation that in order for you to be successful, you have to take care of the books first. That’s one thing she preached about, because at any point, other stuff can be taken away.
We all draw inspiration from women whose names make the headlines and whose stories are in the history books, but often our greatest inspiration comes from our mothers, grandmothers, aunts, teachers, and friends.
I separate myself from my characters as much as possible, but I have these books that I create which are interactive diaries/timelines/memory books/pictures of the character’s entire world.
I write out of gratitude for all the books I have loved over the years.
I never read too many comic books when I was growing up, but I think everyone loved Wolverine, you know what I’m saying?
I have to have a character worth caring about. I tend not to start writing books about people I don’t have a lot of sympathy for because I’m just going to be with them too long.
My best investment, as cliched as this sounds, is the money I’ve spent developing myself, via books, workshops and coaching. Leadership begins within, and to have a better career, start by building a better you.
The more books we read, the clearer it becomes that the true function of a writer is to produce a masterpiece and that no other task is of any consequence.
My most successful books, the ones that I feel the strongest about, are the ones that started with a premise that for me was deeply emotional.
Books, I found, had the power to make time stand still, retreat or fly into the future.
Books are my weakness.
I don’t like books that seem to want to teach me things. Which is not to say that one doesn’t learn from books – but you do your own learning in your own way.
I’m a total Twihard. I read all the books and saw every movie on opening night with my mom.
I’ve always had great respect for Paddington because he is amusingly English and eccentric. He is a great British institution and my generation grew up with the books and then Michael Horden’s animations.
When I was a kid, I used to send away for those ventriloquist kits on the back of comic books.
Books are as useful to a stupid person as a mirror is useful to a blind person.
To return to the books of my childhood is to yield to the strain of nostalgia that is curious about the self I once was.
Muslims are not bloodthirsty people. Islam is a religion of peace that forbids the killing of the innocent. Islam also accepts the Prophets, whether those prophets are Mohammed, God’s peace and blessing be upon Him, or Moses or the other prophets of the Books.
I have expressed my opinion through the written word through my books, that is all.
It wasn’t that the teachers were bad. From what I can remember, they were pretty good. It was about the selection of books. It was about not seeing my young life reflected back to me: my family dynamics, the noise and complexities of my neighborhood, the things I loved, like ice cream trucks and Kool-Aid.
When I’m not writing or tweaking my computer, I do embroidery. When I’m not plunging into the past, tweaking, or embroidering, I’m reading books about history, computers, or embroidery.
The books that help you most are those which make you think that most. The hardest way of learning is that of easy reading; but a great book that comes from a great thinker is a ship of thought, deep freighted with truth and beauty.
I had a friend who worked at a hospice, and he said people in their final moments don’t discuss their successes, awards or what books they wrote or what they accomplished. They only talk about their loves and their regrets, and I think that’s very telling.
Censorship ends in logical completeness when nobody is allowed to read any books except the books that nobody reads.
We don’t need lists of rights and wrongs, tables of do’s and don’ts: we need books, time, and silence. Thou shalt not is soon forgotten, but Once upon a time lasts forever.
The writer I feel the most affinity with – you said you felt my books are 19th century novels, I think they’re 18th century novels – is Fielding, Henry Fielding, he’s the guy who does it for me.
I used to have all the Goosebumps books as a kid too.
The books that everybody admires are those that nobody reads.
I don’t want my books to exclude anyone, but if they have to, then I would rather they excluded the people who feel they are too smart for them!
If sex is such a natural phenomenon, how come there are so many books on how to do it?
The experience gathered from books, though often valuable, is but the nature of learning; whereas the experience gained from actual life is one of the nature of wisdom.
It is up to us to change laws on the books like ‘Stand Your Ground’ laws and push elected officials to enact regulations that hold police officers to the same standards as the rest of society. This is why we vote.
Since I’ve written many of my books from a less-than-sympathetic viewpoint, I think that being able to see things from all sides is a useful talent.
Jane Austen was writing about boring people with desperately limited lives. We forget this because we’ve seen too many of her books on screen.
When I’m in my car, I’m listening to books, audio books, always.
Every 10 years you’re a different person, and the really great books evolve with you as you get older. They’re full of new rewards.
I like Nietzsche. I quote him in many of my books. He was born 100 years before me.
When you read the Bible, you are reading the Holy Spirit and not history books. When you read history books, you are reading about events, but the Bible is not an event. So, when you are reading the Holy Spirit, you are supposed to be carried along by it.
As far as I know, no kid ever bought a children’s book himself with his own money, but they’ll buy comic books. So we better make them good.
With my earlier books, I got quite bored being with one protagonist all the way through. With the Alex Morrow books, I wanted to do something a bit more holistic, so there were lots of different points of view, and I wanted to look at aspects of crime that you don’t tend to look at.
How much energy is wasted in Italy in trying to write the novel that obeys all the rules. The energy might have been useful to provide us with more modest, more genuine things, that had less pretensions: short stories, memoirs, notes, testimonials, or at any rate, books that are open, without a preconceived plan.
All books are divisible into two classes, the books of the hour, and the books of all time.
I was always writing the books that I wanted to write, books that demanded to be written at the time. But, like most writers, you start off feeling your way.
Young men should prove theorems, old men should write books.
‘The Chicken Soup for the Soul’ books are the result of over 20 years of teaching seminars and giving speeches. The first book contains all of the stories that I used in my seminars to illustrate the points that I wanted to make.
I write about characters that interest me. And I don’t think of my books as being forms of entertainment.
Any kid who has two parents who are interested in him and has a houseful of books isn’t poor.
Other people are talking about writing books about my life, or about some of the things I’ve done. I find it strange, but I also feel it’s my life and my story, and I guess I better be the one to get it on paper the way it actually happened.
Conservatives should insist that defense spending be examined with the same seriousness that we demand in examining the books of those government agencies that spend taxpayer money in the name of welfare, the environment, or education.
A single conversation across the table with a wise man is better than ten years mere study of books.
That can be the most painstaking aspect of being a teen, figuring out what the world really looks like. If you find someone in a book, you know you’re not alone and that’s what’s so comforting about books.
If I haven’t any talent for writing books or newspaper articles, well, then I can always write for myself.
I think Russell Brand’s books should be criticised for being rubbish – but it is true that there’s a professional class of opinion-former who has a financial interest in their job not being taken away.
I truly believe that when the history books are written, our age will be remembered for three things: the war on terror, the digital revolution, and what we did – or did not do – to put the fire out in Africa. History, like God, is watching what we do.
It is a good thing for an uneducated man to read books of quotations.
If you look at the beginning of children’s entertainment in literature, the first books that were written for kids were cautionary tales. They were books that were there to teach kids about growing up and how to live life.
The bastard form of mass culture is humiliated repetition… always new books, new programs, new films, news items, but always the same meaning.
Who has fully realized that history is not contained in thick books but lives in our very blood?
It was books that taught me that the things that tormented me most were the very things that connected me with all the people who were alive, or who had ever been alive.
To paint comic books as childish and illiterate is lazy. A lot of comic books are very literate – unlike most films.
Books let us into their souls and lay open to us the secrets of our own.
Books and opinions, no matter from whom they came, if they are in opposition to human rights, are nothing but dead letters.
I always carry a sketchbook around with me, and I sketch whenever I can… I might be in a financial review and be sketching because I find that I actually listen better when I sketch. Truth be told, there are probably more sketches in my books than there are written notes.
I feel sorry for kids these days. They get so much homework. Remember the days when we put a belt around our two books and carried them home? Now they’re dragging a suitcase. They have school all day, then homework from six until eleven. There’s no time left to be creative.
I was never really a nerd. I’m not really into comic books or Dungeons and Dragons or any of that kind of stuff. I was in drama class, and I’m a big movie and music buff. And I’m into sports.
Half of my library are old books because I like seeing how people thought about their world at their time. So that I don’t get bigheaded about something we just discovered and I can be humble about where we might go next. Because you can see who got stuff right and most of the people who got stuff wrong.
Three children have become adults since a phone call with Jo Rowling, containing one small clue, persuaded me that there was more to Snape than an unchanging costume, and that even though only three of the books were out at that time, she held the entire massive but delicate narrative in the surest of hands.
I’ve never turned into a bee – I’ve never been chased by a mummy or met a ghost. But many of the ideas in my books are suggested by real life.
Read a lot – poems, prose, stories, newspapers, anything. Read books and poems that you think you will like and some that you think might not be for you. You might be surprised.
I don’t get my inspiration from books or a painting. I get it from the women I meet.
I don’t often reread my own books, unless I am going into another in the series and need to refresh my mood when originating the concept.
I’m inspired by many different things. Often, I’m inspired by experiences I’ve had, books I’ve read, people I’ve met, stories I’ve heard.
I’ve read every one of Donald Goines’ books. So as soon as I heard there was an opportunity for one of his novels to be turned into a movie, I jumped at the opportunity.
Books serve to show a man that those original thoughts of his aren’t very new at all.
The tree I had in the garden as a child, my beech tree, I used to climb up there and spend hours. I took my homework up there, my books, I went up there if I was sad, and it just felt very good to be up there among the green leaves and the birds and the sky.
I have written about Chile extensively, and therefore I have read many books on the subject, mostly for research.
I wrote a few children’s books… not on purpose.
But, you know, I just did a big trip in the spring to Vietnam and Cambodia and Thailand, and that’s when I bought a Kindle. I have like 15 books on this one little gizmo. But when I came home, the first night I picked up the book that was on my nightstand and I went right back to that.
We must enforce the laws we have on the books, secure our borders, and deny special benefits to illegal immigrants such as in-state tuition rates. This approach is best for American citizens and is fair to those who have taken the time and effort to go through the legal immigration process.
I would never require anyone to read any book. That seems antithetical to why we read – which is to choose a book for our personal reasons. I always shudder when I’m told my books are on required reading lists.
My mom says: ‘Why aren’t you a doctor?’ and I’m like, ‘I am a doctor!’ and she’s all, ‘No, I mean a real doctor.’ She reads my books, but she says they give her a headache.
Sometimes people ask if my books have morals or lessons for readers, and I shudder at that thought. I always say that I have more questions than answers.
When I die there may be a paragraph or two in the newspapers. My name will linger in the British Museum Reading Room catalogue for a space at the head of a long list of books for which no one will ever ask.
Often I hear people say they do not have time to read. That’s absolute nonsense. In the one year during which I kept that kind of record, I read twenty-five books while waiting for people. In offices, applying for jobs, waiting to see a dentist, waiting in a restaurant for friends, many such places.
My passion has always been books and literature, and teaching.
Italy is full of historical buildings. And Europe holds a great history of philosophy from Greece until today. I read all those books and see these buildings, and I think of where I stand when I design my architecture.
I’ve got beautiful reviews for all my books, and I’m very well thought of in the tiny circles that know me, but I’m really starving.
I’m snobby about books that aren’t crime fiction: if I start reading a literary novel and there’s no mystery emerging in the first few pages, I’m like, ‘Gah, this obviously isn’t a proper book. Why would I want to carry on reading it?’
Upon books the collective education of the race depends; they are the sole instruments of registering, perpetuating and transmitting thought.
In the offseason I allow my body to recover, my mind to recover. I like to be with my family, to read books, and know what is going on in the world, to understand how people think.
Censorship is a strange situation. There was times when people would burn books because they didn’t like what people were doing.
I think you’d have to literally live in a cave to not know anything about ‘Twilight’. I’ve seen a few of the movies, but I haven’t read the books.
I read a lot, but in comparison to my family, it’s nothing. I keep telling them, ‘I’m the illiterate of the family.’ My grandfather used to read five books at a time.
I got the idea for ‘Throne of Glass’ when I was sixteen. Music always inspires my books, and when I was listening to the ‘Cinderella’ soundtrack, I thought, ‘What if Cinderella was actually an assassin who liked getting dressed up all pretty and going to the ball, but then she wouldn’t mind kicking butt?’
Earth and sky, woods and fields, lakes and rivers, the mountain and the sea, are excellent schoolmasters, and teach some of us more than we can ever learn from books.
I loved books; I read my childhood away. I was more interested in my interior world.
It’s been said that the men in my books have been absent, or weak, or creepy.
All that I know about my life, it seems, I have learned in books.
In some Old Testament books, it’s very evident that an editor has been at work. That’s quite all right. It’s part of the process.
I do like books on anatomy. I have to say I’m an amateur physician, I guess.
History books that contain no lies are extremely dull.
By 2025, we can expect the world to be completely digital. Paper books will be a thing of the past. Education will be delivered through analytics-based assessment tools and adaptive learning platforms.
There is a prevailing school of thought that something good must take time, sometimes years to create and hone. I have always felt that the books I have written fastest have been my best – because I caught an unstoppable momentum in the writing.
One of the reasons I love writing for middle graders, besides their voracious appetite for books, is their deep concern for fairness and morality.
There are a lot of Chinese comics, but the Chinese comics tend to be more historical and conservative. Japanese culture, just the comics are amazing. They’re like films: very few words; they move so much in these books with hundreds of pages.
When I write, I try to think back to what I was afraid of or what was scary to me, and try to put those feelings into books.
In the case of good books, the point is not to see how many of them you can get through, but how many can get through to you.
I used to get a haircut every Saturday so I would never miss any of the comic books. I had practically no hair when I was a kid!
If there is one thing I hope my books do always and forever, it’s that they honor working people.
Be careful about reading health books. You may die of a misprint.
As it turned out, if you look at the history, everything in superhero comic books pretty much lies between Superman and Batman: Superman being the greatest superhero there is, and Batman being the one of the few superheroes who has no superpowers and is, in fact, not a superhero.
Books give not wisdom where none was before. But where some is, there reading makes it more.
All of the books in the world contain no more information than is broadcast as video in a single large American city in a single year. Not all bits have equal value.
I don’t read books much.
My first two books are out of print and, okay, they can sleep there comfortably. It’s early work, derivative work.
There are books on our shelves we haven’t read and doubtless never will, that each of us has probably put to one side in the belief that we will read them later on, perhaps even in another life.
From a child I was fond of reading, and all the little money that came into my hands was ever laid out in books. Pleased with the ‘Pilgrim’s Progress,’ my first collection was of John Bunyan’s works in separate little volumes.
My attitudes have changed, but somebody would have to read all my books to find out how they have.
The printing press did something really big for the world when everyone could get books in their hands and read.
If I see Marian Keyes’ books or Patricia Scanlan’s books given more prominence than mine in the bookstore, I’ll move mine to the front. I’ve told them I do this, and they’ve confessed to doing the same thing to me.
A lot of my books have started with an abstract premise.
Books, like proverbs, receive their chief value from the stamp and esteem of the ages through which they have passed.
About 15 years ago I went though a period of a year or so when I just couldn’t find anything good. My wife noticed I was having trouble reading menus. I bought some cheap reading glasses in a drug store. I got home and suddenly all these books that weren’t good were good.
I’m a geophysicist and all my earth science books when I was a student, I had to give the wrong answer to get an A. We used to ridicule continental drift. It was something we laughed at. We learned of Marshall Kay’s geosynclinal cycle, which is a bunch of crap.
My husband and I like to reminisce about how, when we were 9, we read straight through L. Frank Baum’s ‘Oz’ series, books filled with wizards and witches. And you know what those subversive tales taught us? That we loved to read!
I didn’t go to school a full year until I was 11 or 12, so I lived in books. I really was an observer of life.
I don’t have a real home. When I got ‘Avatar,’ I sold everything that I owned because I knew it was going to be a long journey. I’ve got two bags, and that was four years ago, and I’ve been working ever since, and I’ve still only got two bags – a bag of books and a bag of clothes. That’s about it.
The best students come from homes where education is revered: where there are books, and children see their parents reading them.
I love to walk into Borders or Barnes & Noble and see my books there. It’s fabulous.
We do not need to proselytise either by our speech or by our writing. We can only do so really with our lives. Let our lives be open books for all to study.
But a girl of seventeen is not always thinking of books, especially in the Oxford summer term.
For books are more than books, they are the life, the very heart and core of ages past, the reason why men worked and died, the essence and quintessence of their lives.
The Classics are those books which constitute a treasured experience for those who have read and loved them; but they remain just as rich an experience for those who reserve the chance to read them for when they are in the best condition to enjoy them.
Songs won’t save the planet, but neither will books or speeches.
I don’t have a favorite author; I have favorite books. ‘Moby Dick’ is a favorite book, but Melville was a drunk who beat his wife. ‘Moveable Feast’ by Hemingway, but I would not like him personally. He was a stupid macho person who believed in shooting animals for fun, but that book was incredible!
The frontiers of a book are never clear-cut: beyond the title, the first lines, and the last full stop, beyond its internal configuration and its autonomous form, it is caught up in a system of references to other books, other texts, other sentences: it is a node within a network.
I write because I have an innate need to. I write because I can’t do normal work. I write because I want to read books like the ones I write. I write because I am angry at everyone. I write because I love sitting in a room all day writing. I write because I can partake of real life only by changing it.
I don’t know how many good books I still have in me; I hope there are another four or five.
Old books that have ceased to be of service should no more be abandoned than should old friends who have ceased to give pleasure.
We are as liable to be corrupted by books, as by companions.
A man loses contact with reality if he is not surrounded by his books.
God be thanked for books; they are the voices of the distant and the dead, and make us heirs of the spiritual life of past ages.
I like books. I read a lot, to be honest.
I read books like mad, but I am careful to to let anything I read influence me.
I learned how to read in second grade, and I entered a summer contest at my local library in Chattanooga, Tennessee. If you read more books than anybody else, you got your Polaroid up on the bulletin board, and I did.
I love books; my suitcases are always full of them. Books and shoes. I read when I am sad, when I am happy, when I am nervous. My favourite British author is Jane Austen, and my favourite American one is John O’Hara.
There were two free public libraries within walking distance of my home; I remember taking six books home from every visit, the limit set by the library.
Few and far between are the books you’ll cherish, returning to them time and again, to revisit old friends, relive old happiness, and recapture the magic of that first read.
Whatever happened to books? Suddenly everybody’s talking about these 100-hour movies called ‘Breaking Bad’. People are talking about TV the same way they used to talk about novels back in the 1980s. I like to think I hang out with some pretty smart people, but all they talk about is ‘Breaking Bad.’
I’ve read plenty of amazing science pieces where the writers don’t hang out in labs. I just have fun doing it. And I get rewarded for it; I get gushy, especially when kids tell me they expected to be bored by my books, but weren’t.
The worst thing about new books is that they keep us from reading the old ones.
Personally, I really enjoy sci-fi. I watch it, I read comic books, and I play video games. I love this kind of world, so to be able to work in it is a dream. I enjoy it. It’s all good.
There are two sides to me. One is the writer. That’s a savage person who looks at everything as a story and, you know, wants to use real life in his books. The other part is the Midwesterner, who, you know, wants to say nice things about people and be polite.
I’ve written a number of books that have to do with the evolution of humans, human intelligence, human emotions.
My first four books were not published because nobody wanted them. They were adult books, not kids’ books.
I collect books and I have some really, really old schoolbooks, and God is mentioned on every single page.
You are welcome to your intellectual pastimes and books and art and newspapers; welcome, too, to your bars and your whisky that only makes me ill. Here am I in the forest, quite content.
Books are the bees which carry the quickening pollen from one to another mind.
I try hard and aim big. People can hate or love my books but they can never accuse me of not trying.
I worked at a nursing home though high school… There’s a lost appreciation for a generation that has so much to tell us when we’re so full of self-help books and doctors on TV.
Books are the quietest and most constant of friends; they are the most accessible and wisest of counselors, and the most patient of teachers.
There are books of which the backs and covers are by far the best parts.
Always in my books, I like to throw that rogue element into a stable situation and then see what happens.
I would never want a book’s autograph. I am a proud non-reader of books.
Abdias do Nascimento was the first writer who gave me racial consciousness. It was through his books and writings that I first took in the real weight of race in our society. He was the main influence on me because in my family, race was never an issue.
I don’t remember being taught to read, and by the time I was seven years old, I had read a very great many books, good, bad, and indifferent.
It’s funny, because I don’t have a very addictive personality in any way except for things like stories or books or movies or TV. I just get, like, completely enamored and lost in that world, especially when one really hits the right way. Like, I just can’t do anything else.
With so many forty- and fifty something mums and dads in Converse stalking the streets, I can see why there’s a slew of books about the menopause and middle age, the most recent addition being David Bainbridge’s plucky, glass-half-full meditation or, as he calls it, ‘natural history.’
I was obsessed with girls when I was 13 years old; I wasn’t really into books.
My father is a visual artist, so I was influenced by him, and my mother is an English teacher who forced me to read a lot of books and poetry and get involved in theatre. I developed a varied taste for different arts.
Hunted for sport by the rich, then driven from large tracts of its natural habitat by agricultural and housing development, the giant panda deserves better than to be scrubbed from conservation’s ledger books through false accounting.
I love fiction because in fiction you go into the thoughts of people, the little people, the people who were defeated, the poor, the women, the children that are never in history books.
When you look at the books about well-being, you see one word – it’s happiness. People do not distinguish.
I absorbed as many Impressionist paintings as I could, in Parisian museums and in many museums in the United States and in books, looking for clues to architecture, clothing, settings.
It’s in the history books, the Holocaust. It’s just a phrase. And the truth is it happened yesterday. It happened to my mother. I never met my grandmothers or my grandfathers. They were all wiped up in the gas chambers of Nazi Germany.
You learn a lot about love before you ever get there. You learn at least as much about love from books as you do from watching your parents.
From the Olympian heights of an executive suite, in an atmosphere where your success is judged by the extent to which you can maximise profits, the overwhelming tendency must be to see people as units of production, as indices in your accountants’ books.
I read a lot of true-crime books, but sometimes they can put you in a bad mood.
Books and harlots have their quarrels in public.
At night, when the curtains are drawn and the fire flickers, my books attain a collective dignity.
I always have several books on the go at any one moment, so it’s no good you asking ‘What’s on the bedside table at the moment, Emma?’ because often I can’t even see the table!
The Taliban’s acts of cultural vandalism – the most infamous being the destruction of the giant Bamiyan Buddhas – had a devastating effect on Afghan culture and the artistic scene. The Taliban burned countless films, VCRs, music tapes, books, and paintings. They jailed filmmakers, musicians, painters, and sculptors.
If you feel that there’s the author and then the character, then the book is not working. People have a habit of identifying the author with the narrator, and you can’t, obviously, be all of the narrators in all of your books, or else you’d be a very strange person indeed.
You have to be a lover of books without expecting more of them than they give – a little pleasure, a little insight, a moment of escape, a deepening of your own humanity. Not much else.
Some books are to be tasted, others to be swallowed, and some few to be chewed and digested.
Books are better than movies because you design the set the way you want it to look.
Inspiration comes from everywhere. From life, observing people, etc. From movies and books you love. From research.
Write books only if you are going to say in them the things you would never dare confide to anyone.
Many people have told me that once they learn of Madam Walker’s accomplishments they are surprised, even embarrassed, that they have never heard of her. But they shouldn’t be. Her extraordinary story was simply omitted from the history books.
I don’t read magazines much, and I have an awful time with books.
I am not a self-help writer. I am a self-problem writer. When people read my books, I provoke some things. I cannot justify my work. I do my work; it is up to them to classify it, to judge.
Kids are no longer interested in reading comic books; they’ve got television and the electronic games that they can bury themselves in like ostriches. They don’t have to pay attention to what’s going on in the world around them.
Too many books are full of recipes that aren’t doable at home. They are purely aspirational. They are quite frightening, even for me.
As soon as the printing press started flooding Europe with books, people were complaining that there were too many books and that it was going to change philosophy and the course of human thought in ways that wouldn’t necessarily be good.
Most books, like their authors, are born to die; of only a few books can it be said that death has no dominion over them; they live, and their influence lives forever.
I am aiming my books at anybody with no economics background.
Some books are undeservedly forgotten; none are undeservedly remembered.
As winter approaches – bringing cold weather and family drama – we crave page-turners, books made for long nights and tryptophan-induced sloth.
Some of my friends are giving me law books. I love reading those. It’s like my relaxation.
Movies can’t ruin books. They can only ruin movies.
I read a bunch of books about Mengele because he was pretty sick. That was how ‘Angel Of Death’ came about. I know why people misinterpret it, just because we don’t say Nazism is very bad. They get this knee-jerk reaction to it.
Don’t give me books for Christmas; I already have a book.
Who ever converses among old books will be hard to please among the new.
The books I used to love as a kid, I used to read football books – and by that I mean soccer books – stories about boys in school who started to play football and then became the captain. I’d read them cover to cover. I just got lost in them.
Graphic novels are all about fantasies. Superman and Batman started it. It’s like a reaction to environment around you. You desire to do things in comic books or films what you can’t do in real life.
I admire the world of the books and the characters that she’s created, but I’m not an addict of Harry Potter. I don’t feel possessive about it.
There are many little ways to enlarge your child’s world. Love of books is the best of all.
Teachers are not supposed to be repositories of information which they dish out. That is from an age when there were no other repositories of information, other than books or teachers, neither of which were portable. A lot of my big task is retraining these teachers.
A recluse without books and ink is already in life a dead man.
Heart is what drives us and determines our fate. That is what I need for my characters in my books: a passionate heart. I need mavericks, dissidents, adventurers, outsiders and rebels, who ask questions, bend the rules and take risks.
An apology for the devil: it must be remembered that we have heard one side of the case. God has written all the books.
A surprising number of people – including many students of literature – will tell you they haven’t really lived in a book since they were children. Sadly, being taught literature often destroys the life of the books.
Education from six-year-old to 14 is compulsory in Nigeria, but the simple fact is that a lack of resources, coupled with peoples’ inability to afford books and uniforms mean the reality for millions of Nigerian children is a life without education.
My books are inert as cordwood till a reader’s imagination ignites one and an old flame jumps to life.
Productivity is a relative matter. And it’s really insignificant: What is ultimately important is a writer’s strongest books.
Professional reviewers read so many bad books in the course of duty that they get an unhealthy craving for arresting phrases.
I love everything that’s old, – old friends, old times, old manners, old books, old wine.
Study how water flows in a valley stream, smoothly and freely between the rocks. Also learn from holy books and wise people. Everything – even mountains, rivers, plants and trees – should be your teacher.
Books choose their authors; the act of creation is not entirely a rational and conscious one.
The younger generation is surrounded by the Internet, apps, and video games. But somehow, my books make them read.
I love picture books – with picture books, you can use words and pictures as a double act, even tell two different versions of a story at the same time.
Books written by boys are given very different treatment to those written by girls: they’re even given very different covers. People also expect, in this YA-booming world, girls to be less experimental than boys: girls are achieving a lot of success, but they’re confined.
One of the books we read a few years ago that had a big effect on us was Repeated Takes by Michael Chanan.
I’ve written 18 books, mostly dealing with issues of social justice, ending racism, feminism, and cultural criticism.
My books are like water; those of the great geniuses are wine. (Fortunately) everybody drinks water.
I think the films we see, the Hollywood films, which are basically entertainment, will still be there, but they’ll be in a totally different category. People won’t take them seriously. They’ll kind of end up the way comic books have. A side view of things.
Art needs to be socialised, and you need a lot of context to understand that, and that doesn’t mean having read a few art history books.
Works of art often last forever, or nearly so. But exhibitions themselves, especially gallery exhibitions, are like flowers; they bloom and then they die, then exist only as memories, or pressed in magazines and books.
My legacy is to put my name in the history books in boxing.
The impulse to dream was slowly beaten out of me by experience. Now it surged up again and I hungered for books, new ways of looking and seeing.
I am not a fan of books.
I want to go down in the history books as one of the greatest female boxers of all time, and I think I’m on the right path.
I want to read books and go for walks and make dinner. I guess there are people who love working and that’s great. I’m not one of them. I love tackling roles and I love theater, but filming, I don’t get it. It seems mind-numbing to me.
When I get a little money I buy books; and if any is left I buy food and clothes.
Artemis women often have difficult childhoods. She’s the kid who seeks comfort in the woods, or animals, or books. If trapped in an authoritarian family, she blends in to get by – but keeps a fierce autonomy inside her head and heart, looking to the day she breaks free.
The true university of these days is a collection of books.
Being transgender is more than just medical books and everything, procedures. It’s something spiritual in which you’re finding yourself and really discovering who you are and learning to love yourself.
Wisdom is not wisdom when it is derived from books alone.
I never stop reading. I read everything, and I read every day. If you never read anything, be curious. Curiosity is the true foundation of education, reading things that we’ve factually already agreed on, and I love reading books. With that said, it’s more important that you ask the question ‘why.’
I don’t read enough books, so I guess I’m pretty shallow. I’m a lot into the physical. With me, first attraction is never intellectual.
One sheds one’s sicknesses in books – repeats and presents again one’s emotions, to be master of them.
My mother has always encouraged me to do what I love. When I started being interested in fashion, she was very supportive, bringing me to see exhibits and buying me books. And when I started my company, she was right there to help me!
I enjoy about 1 out of 100 movies, it’s about the same proportion to books published that I care to read.
I try to write the books I would love to come upon that are honest, concerned with real lives, human hearts, spiritual transformation, families, secrets, wonder, craziness – and that can make me laugh.
We found nothing grand in the history of the Jews nor in the morals inculcated in the Pentateuch. I know of no other books that so fully teach the subjection and degradation of woman.
My freshman English professor at Kent State University in 1984 told me I was a good writer, and she loved all the silly pictures I drew in my notebook. She said I should try writing children’s books, and so I did.
There is more treasure in books than in all the pirate’s loot on Treasure Island.
I understand the visual media very well, as I used to write comic books for Walt Disney, and I’ve written a graphic novel. How you carry a story in pictures is different than how you do it in text.
I’m screamingly funny, you know, I really am in the books. And that helps because I’m funnier than a lot of people, I think, and that’s appreciated by young people.
One of the reasons it is considered such a privilege to sit on a Man Booker jury is because it is famously rigorous. The judging is not a gig for lightweights. Not only are all five judges expected to have read all 155 books from beginning to end, but they have to be able to talk fluently about every book at length.
Keeping books on social aid is capitalistic nonsense. I just use the money for the poor. I can’t stop to count it.
I have been blessed with friends who do things rather than buy things: friends who will change books at the library, take a bag of your old clothes to a thrift store, bring you cuttings and plant them in a window box, fill the bird feeder in your garden when you can’t get out.
Books are the money of Literature, but only the counters of Science.
I always had really good teachers, that were always about more than what was in the books. Those little advice and tips can set you down the right path in your life.
The books that the world calls immoral are books that show the world its own shame.
I’ve said it before, and I’ll say it again: writing picture books is an art – the art of word choice.
I think that Curt Swan, when he did Superman for the longest time, became the definitive Superman artist, and everybody got it. That made him very, very special in the annals of comic books.
Every ceremony or rite has a value if it is performed without alteration. A ceremony is a book in which a great deal is written. Anyone who understands can read it. One rite often contains more than a hundred books.
I often feel I’m a disappointment to people because they expect me to be the guy in the books. When I sit next to someone at a dinner party I can see they expect me to be quick and witty, and I’m not at all.
Why do I do this every Sunday? Even the book reviews seem to be the same as last week’s. Different books same reviews.
We are the children of a technological age. We have found streamlined ways of doing much of our routine work. Printing is no longer the only way of reproducing books. Reading them, however, has not changed.
He who studies books alone will know how things ought to be, and he who studies men will know how they are.
It is from books that wise people derive consolation in the troubles of life.
When I know the data that’s being shared and I’m asked explicitly for my consent, I want some sites to understand my habits. It helps them suggest books for me to read or movies for my family to watch or friends for us to connect with.
The books that I wrote in my late teens and 20s, the little love stories, they were right from the heart.
I dare not stay home while Quichuas perish. What if the well-filled church in the homeland needs stirring? They have the Scriptures, Moses, and the prophets, and a whole lot more. Their condemnation is written on their bank books and in the dust on their Bible covers.
With my childhood, it’s a wonder I’m not psychotic. I was the little Jewish boy in the non-Jewish neighborhood. It was a little like being the first Negro enrolled in the all-white school. I grew up in libraries and among books, without friends.
What don’t I want to learn? I have how-to books, history, nature. Ain’t nobody here saying, ‘You’d better learn this.’ But I still think I’ve got a head on my shoulders, and it pleases me.
You can read books on stuff all day long, but until you get out there and just do it, if you want to start playing, and you want to make some music, then go out and play. Go find yourself a venue and play, even if it’s in your home. Just play every day. You win the fight by fighting.
Travel teaches as much as books.
Focus in on the genre you want to write, and read books in that genre. A LOT of books by a variety of authors. And read with questions in your mind.
I read a book a day when I was a kid. My family was not literary; we did not have any books in the house.
We used to root for the Indians against the cavalry, because we didn’t think it was fair in the history books that when the cavalry won it was a great victory, and when the Indians won it was a massacre.
Two of my favourite books are Henry Miller’s ‘Tropic of Cancer’ and ‘Tropic of Capricorn.’
Have you ever heard the expression: Walk a mile in my shoes, and then judge me? And write your own books.
I know that some books and some writers, you can pretty much draw a square around it and say, ‘Nobody under 40,’ or ‘Nobody under 25.’ With my books, it always has been, and continues to be, spread right across the board, and I think the operative term is ‘reader.’
One of the things I learned, one of the strangest things, is how to think. There was nothing else to do. I couldn’t see people, or go for a walk in the forest. All I had was my head and my books, and I thought a lot.
Those who decide to use leisure as a means of mental development, who love good music, good books, good pictures, good plays, good company, good conversation – what are they? They are the happiest people in the world.
And this, our life, exempt from public haunt, finds tongues in trees, books in the running brooks, sermons in stones, and good in everything.
Reading about nature is fine, but if a person walks in the woods and listens carefully, he can learn more than what is in books, for they speak with the voice of God.
I am a writer of books in retrospect. I talk in order to understand; I teach in order to learn.
When I was growing up, my house was filled with books. My mother was an educator, and my father was a history buff, so our home was a virtual library, covering every author from Beverly Cleary to James Michener.
When I first became captain of the Indian cricket team in 2000, many well-wishers and journalist friends gifted me the classic Mike Brearley book, ‘The Art of Captaincy.’ I mean no disrespect to the book or Mr, Brearley, who I admire a great deal, but books or team meetings don’t make you good captains.
I don’t write books inadvertently.
Ideas are only lethal if you suppress and don’t discuss them. Ignorance is not bliss, it’s stupid. Banning books shows you don’t trust your kids to think and you don’t trust yourself to be able to talk to them.
Read books. They are good for us.
I’m a complete democrat in terms of who buys my books.
Books are the ever burning lamps of accumulated wisdom.
They say you don’t want to know how sausage is made. Book coverage is like sausage in that way: better not to know exactly how the gatekeepers of mainstream media choose which books to crown as must-reads each season – just swallow it down with a cold beer and call it a night.
All I can say is, I don’t encourage younger kids to read my books, and actually, the biggest age group on my Facebook page is 25- to 35-year-old women.
I’ve spoken in every state in the union, meeting and hugging the people who later bought my books. I spoke to anybody who wanted to hear me, including 1,000 nuns who could pay me only with homemade bread.
Never lend books, for no one ever returns them; the only books I have in my library are books that other folks have left me.
I’ve always felt, in all my books, that there’s a deep decency in the American people and a native intelligence – providing they have the facts, providing they have the information.
Books! I dunno if I ever told you this, but books are the greatest gift one person can give another.
The only thing that I discovered very early on is that, even though we might change schools and cities and towns and states, the books in the library were the same. They had the same covers. They had the same characters. I could go and visit those people in the library as if I knew them.
My knowledge of electrical subjects was not acquired in a methodical manner but was picked up from such books as I could get hold of and from such experiments as I could make with my own hands.
There are still some people out there who believe comic books are nothing more than, well, comic books. But the true cognoscenti know graphic novels are – at their best – an amazing blend of art literature and the theater of the mind.
If I loved all the world as I do you, I shouldn’t write books to it: I should only write letters to it, and that would be only a clumsy stage on the way to entire telepathy.
There are two things that I really love; vintage clothing and books. Mash the two together and I pretty much peak on personal joy levels.
It’s weirder and more surprising than the other books. I think there are more places where it’s just more reality bending, deliberately so. I think it’s a lot more emotionally raw.
Books were my pass to personal freedom. I learned to read at age three, and soon discovered there was a whole world to conquer that went beyond our farm in Mississippi.
We are one people with one family. We all live in the same house… and through books, through information, we must find a way to say to people that we must lay down the burden of hate. For hate is too heavy a burden to bear.
We cannot learn men from books.
I love old books. They tell you stories about their use. You can see where the fingerprints touched the pages as they held the book open. You can see how long they lingered on each page by the finger stains.
We live in such a celebrity-driven culture, but all those people have to go buy toilet paper, and all those people have products they use and their favorite sweet treats. They all have to write to-do lists, and they’re all reading books – well, hopefully most people are doing those things.
My main wish is to get my books into other people’s rooms, and to keep other people’s books out of mine.
No matter how much time you spend reading books or following your intuition, you’re gonna screw it up. Fifty times. You can’t do parenting right.
I write books to find out about things.
I guess my guilty pleasure would be listening to the British audio versions of the ‘Harry Potter’ books.
A friend in the War Office warned me that I was in Kitchener’s black books, and that orders had been given for my arrest next time I appeared in France.
The books of C.S. Lewis had a very profound, indirect effect on me.
Sometimes the very best of all summer books is a blank notebook. Get one big enough, and you can practice sketching the lemon slice in your drink or the hot lifeguard on the beach or the vista down the hill from your cabin.
I read a lot of Zen books. And I grew up surfing, so that has always been my escape.
We shouldn’t teach great books; we should teach a love of reading.
It is an awfully sad misconception that librarians simply check books in and out. The library is the heart of a school, and without a librarian, it is but an empty shell.
All the books on my shelves, when I would go to them to look for help with my anguish, they all just seemed so crass. They didn’t get it. Those books don’t understand. Nobody understands.
Books are something social – a writer speaking to a reader – so I think making the reading of a book the center of a social event, the meeting of a book club, is a brilliant idea.
There are too many books I haven’t read, too many places I haven’t seen, too many memories I haven’t kept long enough.
There was a time when the world acted on books; now books act on the world.
I wish I had known that education is the key. That knowledge is power. Now I pick up books and watch educational shows with my husband. I’m seeing how knowledge can elevate you.
I don’t plot my books rigidly, follow a preconceived structure. A novel mustn’t be a closed system – it’s a quest.
A free and democratic society is not the norm. When you look to the history books, world history was not based on great democratic societies but on imperialism, absolute rule, kings, queens, monarchs, dictators.
Most of the great books on prayer are written by ‘experts’ – monks, missionaries, mystics, saints. I’ve read scores of them, and mainly they make me feel guilty.
A morning-glory at my window satisfies me more than the metaphysics of books.
I know at my church a lot of the times we sung from hymn books and as we got older we started to change with time. I can honestly say that I was never influenced to write for the church.
Being attracted to my own sex was as much part of who I was as being short or blonde or drawn to the library, but I was made to grow up feeling ‘other.’ Most books, films – even advertisements – didn’t reflect how I felt, and I often watched the world from the outside.
All books are either dreams or swords, you can cut, or you can drug, with words.
Life is all about sharing. If we are good at something, pass it on. That is the pleasure I get from teaching – whether it is television or books. We should all share.
Observation more than books and experience more than persons, are the prime educators.
I read a lot of obscure books and it is nice to open a book.
I look forward the day that I could work on my farm, create music, write books, and be with the wife and kids around the clock – and live a normal life.
Read the best books first, or you may not have a chance to read them at all.
To study the phenomena of disease without books is to sail an uncharted sea, while to study books without patients is not to go to sea at all.
I read a lot of nonfiction – especially books about the brain.
The three books I’ve written in Florida about L.A. are my best takes on the physicality of the city, as far as description goes.
The true treasure lies within. It is the underlying theme of the songs we sing, the shows we watch and the books we read. It is woven into the Psalms of the Bible, the ballads of the Beatles and practically every Bollywood film ever made. What is that treasure? Love. Love is the nature of the Divine.
If my books can help children become readers, then I feel I have accomplished something important.
I asked a French critic a couple of years ago why my books did so well in France. He said it was because in my novels people both act and think. I got a kick out of that.
The good books stick around for a reason. There is a reason that we come back to them and they are so rewarding.
I know many books which have bored their readers, but I know of none which has done real evil.
I’ve always done more than I ever thought I would. Becoming a professor – I never would have imagined that. Writing books – I never would have imagined that. Getting a Ph.D. – I’m not sure I would even have imagined that. I’ve lived my life a step at a time. Things sort of happened.
Inflation is taxation and taxation is theft that takes more money out of hard-working Americans’ pocket books.
Look at a book. A book is the right size to be a book. They’re solar-powered. If you drop them, they keep on being a book. You can find your place in microseconds. Books are really good at being books, and no matter what happens, books will survive.
I knew I would read all kinds of books and try to get at what it is that makes good writers good. But I made no promises that I would write books a lot of people would like to read.
Jim Longenbach, poet, critic, and my husband, is always passing along life-changing books for me to read.
My only books were woman’s looks, and folly’s all they’ve taught me.
Perhaps it is partly that we need to love books ourselves as parents, grandparents and teachers in order to pass on that passion for stories to our children. It’s not about testing and reading schemes, but about loving stories and passing on that passion to our children.
If you think you have it tough, read history books.
Aeroplanes interested me, and at the outbreak of the Second World War, I joined the RAF as a volunteer reservist. I took the opportunity of studying the books which the RAF made available for radio mechanics and looked forward to an interesting course in radio.
I got into writing because books and stories were always a big part of my life. I loved listening to them and then reading them, and I loved making them up.
Men have had every advantage of us in telling their own story. Education has been theirs in so much higher a degree; the pen has been in their hands. I will not allow books to prove anything.
Basically, books were a luxury item before the printing press.
After all manner of professors have done their best for us, the place we are to get knowledge is in books. The true university of these days is a collection of books.
Every book you pick up has its own lesson or lessons, and quite often the bad books have more to teach than the good ones.
These are not books, lumps of lifeless paper, but minds alive on the shelves.
Ted Williams is one of the best hitters ever to play the game, and I didn’t get a chance to see him play, so all I could do was read books and look at pictures.
With a few flowers in my garden, half a dozen pictures and some books, I live without envy.
I had no ambition to be a writer because the books I read were too good, my standards were too high.
Books have this function that help me to understand the work I’ve done, to wrap it up.
I’m not into fame. I’m not into making money, outside of financing my books. I’m not into status. My thing is basically about time – not wasting it.
Just as movies, radio, and television evolved into new forms over time, the ebook will also become something more than just a way to read books. It will become its own specific and unique way of creating and sharing experience.
There are worse crimes than burning books. One of them is not reading them.
If you read a lot of books, you’re considered well-read. But if you watch a lot of TV, you’re not considered well-viewed.
It’s hard for children’s authors to be accepted when they try to write adult books. J.K. Rowling is the exception because people are so eager to read anything by her, but it took Judy Blume three or four tries before she had a success.
Do activities you’re passionate about – which make your heart and soul feel perky – including things like working out, cooking, painting, writing, yoga, hiking, walking, swimming, being in nature, being around art, or reading inspiring books.
