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.
