Words matter. These are the best Book Quotes from famous people such as Amish Tripathi, Sarah MacLean, Emma Watson, Nicolle Wallace, Ramon Rodriguez, and they’re great for sharing with your friends.
India is a musical country, so it would appear obvious to use our collective passion for music to promote a book.
‘A Rogue by Any Other Name’ is the first book in the ‘Rules of Scoundrels’ series, centered on a legendary pre-Victorian casino and her four scandalous aristocratic owners.
It sounds so geeky, but I really do like studying and reading, and if I’m not working on ‘Harry Potter,’ then my greatest relaxation is to sit with a book.
I was very much inspired by the things that I’d seen and done in politics, but I was also desperate for a complete departure from the reality of my political experience. ‘It’s Classified’ and my previous book ‘Eighteen Acres’ are both works of fiction, but if they do seem realistic, it’s by design.
On the streets, hanging out with the fellows, there are things you learn that no book can teach you.
Wearing a giant, over-sized scarf will make you look deeply intelligent in almost any situation, but especially a book club.
I struggle with reading a bit. I’m slightly dyslexic, so reading takes me quite a while, and in general, I’m not a big book reader at all. And something like ‘Game of Thrones’ seems very daunting to me!
Particularly when you’re making a movie of a book, people are always waiting with their knives – you know?
The paperback is very interesting but I find it will never replace the hardcover book – it makes a very poor doorstop.
I’m not the biggest comic book fan.
I was that kid with the glasses and the hungry expression who haunted every library book sale and used bookstore in town: the one who always has a book in one hand and is reaching for the next book with the other. There’s one in every town.
Properly, we should read for power. Man reading should be man intensely alive. The book should be a ball of light in one’s hand.
When I wrote ‘Fast Food My Way’ in 2004, I hoped that my friends would prepare my recipes. Now, more people cook from that book than any other I’ve written in the past 30 years.
No one ever committed suicide while reading a good book, but many have tried while trying to write one.
Reading a book, watching a movie, going to a play, it’s transporting, and very, very exciting. And to be a part of that, creating things with your imagination, whoa.
I get an urge, like a pregnant elephant, to go away and give birth to a book.
While writing, I’m always so happy in the middle of a book or finishing a book and really hate starting them, so I often think, ‘I wish I had a really big book to write to which I could devote seven years of my life.’
According to New York publishers, Bill Clinton will get more money for his book than Hillary Clinton got for hers. Well, duh. At least his book has some sex in it.
The movie is actually from a book by Stephen King called The Body. When they were gonna put it to a motion picture, they found the story was a bit too strong for the title The Body, based on a young kid’s movie. It would be too heavy.
After you finish a book, you know, you’re dead. But no one knows you’re dead. All they see is the irresponsibility that comes in after the terrible responsibility of writing.
I’m not a really big comic book person. I know the typical ones – ‘Spider-Man’ and ‘Wonder Woman’ and ‘Storm’ and that stuff. But don’t quiz me, because I’m not good at things like that.
A good book is the precious lifeblood of a master spirit.
You know, songs like ‘Rock’n Me’ were actually written to be played in large… for a hundred thousand people kind of gatherings. And a lot of what came out on ‘Fly Like an Eagle’ and ‘Book of Dreams’ was music that was put together to be played in big, big venues with big light shows.
‘Fast Food Nation’ appeared as an article in ‘Rolling Stone’ before it was a book, so I was extending it from the article, and by that time, everyone could read the article.
I just want the fans of the book to be happy. I don’t necessarily care about anyone else.
A wild and crazy weekend involves sitting on the front porch, smoking a cigar, reading a book.
My career is an open book, but my life is not.
You come home to find your 17-year-old daughter engrossed in a book. Which would delight you more – if it were ‘Twilight’ or ‘Middlemarch?’
I deeply respect literature and expect to gain insight from a book and to identify emotionally with its characters. I therefore avoid reading suspense novels or science fiction.
The Australian Book of Etiquette is a very slim volume.
In a mood of faith and hope my work goes on. A ream of fresh paper lies on my desk waiting for the next book. I am a writer and I take up my pen to write.
And I think that being able to make people laugh and write a book that’s funny makes the information go down a lot easier and it makes it a lot more fun to read, easier to understand, and often stronger. So there’s all kinds of advantages to it.
After I work with my editor to get the manuscript in good shape, I sketch and lay out a whole book loosely, usually in black and white. You learn things about your text when you have to think about pacing and page-turns.
Beware of the person of one book.
The aphorism in which I am the first master among Germans, are the forms of ‘eternity’; my ambition is to say in ten sentences what everyone else says in a book – what everyone else does not say in a book.
I don’t know what to do or where to turn in this taxation matter. Somewhere there must be a book that tells all about it, where I could go to straighten it out in my mind. But I don’t know where the book is, and maybe I couldn’t read it if I found it.
I read the book of Job last night, I don’t think God comes out well in it.
A book that is shut is but a block.
Lord of the Rings was something I always wanted to do. I read the book when I was about 25, and I was always hoping if it was ever made into a feature film that I would be involved in some way. And then I finally got it, and I was over the moon. It was fantastic news.
I’m writing a book called ‘The Indisputable Existence of Santa Claus’ about the maths of Christmas: how to set up a secret Santa so it’s totally fair; how to decorate your tree mathematically; how to win at Monopoly.
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.
There’s no book to figure out how not to become a victim of police brutality.
I teach for the Book Trust, which promotes reading and writing with children.
I wanted to write a book that talked about the emotions of children, which is the rainbow. We all have moods. We talk about being blue when we’re sad, and being yellow when we’re cowards, and when we’re mad, we’re red.
If you’re a public official, your life is an open book.
The key thing about a book is that you lose yourself in the author’s world.
As I approached my 95th birthday, I was burdened to write a book that addressed the epidemic of ‘easy believism.’ There is a mindset today that if people believe in God and do good works, they are going to Heaven.
You can learn a line from a win and a book from a defeat.
A good day is one where I can not just read a book, but write a review of it. Maybe today I’ll be able to do that. I get for some reason somewhat stronger when the sun starts to go down. Dusk is a good time for me. I’m crepuscular.
It’s hard to see a film that’s been made from a book that you really loved because it’s such a different experience.
‘Until Friday Night’ is the first book in my new young adult series, ‘The Field Party.’
I don’t understand people who travel purely gastronomically, who book a Michelin-starred restaurant three months in advance and suddenly find themselves in Copenhagen or Barcelona with a zeitgeist plate of snail porridge.
I have a book of buildings from 25,000 BC. These are huts built out of mammoth bones. These buildings were beautifully made, from the bones of the body into shelter.
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.
Kids are not going to sit and read a slow-paced book. Neither are adults.
I’ve had people turn up to book signings with knives, with guns.
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.
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.
Chum was a British boy’s weekly which, at the end of the year was bound into a single huge book; and the following Christmas parents bought it as Christmas presents for male children.
In music, you can use metaphors with ease – if a person doesn’t understand the parable, they can still enjoy the melody of the music. If, however, a person reads a book and misses the meaning of its metaphors, this will be extremely disheartening for both the reader as well as the author.
There’s a finite amount of time on this planet for each of us. Sometimes, the only way we figure out how to deal with that reality – knowing that there will be an end to every story, and you don’t know how many chapters are left in your book – is by living in denial.
Yes, the Bechdel Test. It’s named for Allison Bechdel, who is a comic book creator. The test is, are there two named women in the film? Do they talk to each other? And is it about something other than a man? I actually think the Bechdel Test is a little advanced for us sometimes.
I gave myself two months to book a job. One month later I was cast on ‘Modern Family.’
The chief reason for going to school is to get the impression fixed for life that there is a book side for everything.
There’s no comparison between NPR and the propaganda that you hear from Rush or from Sean Hannity, the news movement conservatives that are just laying out, slathering out the disinformation and the lies, as I discuss in my book, ‘Lies and the Lying Liars Who Tell Them: A Fair and Balanced Look at the Right.’
I grew up reading the ‘Village Voice’ and wanting to be one of these multidisciplinary music writers, film writers, book writers. And I lucked out getting a job at the ‘Voice’ right after college.
Kindle Singles is publishing on skates. It prints like lightning; our book meets readers in hours. I’ve spent so many years waiting for publishers to consider whether they wanted to print a book of mine, making contracts, taking months to fit it into the Fall list or the Spring list, fitting it into an advertising plan.
I’m outing myself as a huge comic book nerd.
Every book that is banned is a badge of honor.
With ‘California,’ editors were reading it, and fast, and others were emailing my agent to request it. Ultimately, there were a few editors interested in the book, and it sold at auction about two weeks after the submission process started. I couldn’t believe it!
‘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.
Some of the most famous books are the least worth reading. Their fame was due to their having done something that needed to be doing in their day. The work is done and the virtue of the book has expired.
Twenty years ago, I wrote a book called ‘It Takes a Village.’ And a lot of people looked at the title and asked, ‘What the heck do you mean by that?’ This is what I mean. None of us can raise a family, build a business, heal a community or lift a country totally alone.
Each piece of jewellery tells a story of my life. Picking one particular piece as a favorite would be like taking a chapter out of a book.
A major focus of ‘Reality Hunger’ is appropriation and plagiarism and what these terms mean. I can hardly treat the topic deeply without engaging in it. That would be like writing a book about lying and not being permitted to lie in it.
After preliminary work by a number of other distinguished mathematicians and economists, game theory as a systematic theory started with von Neumann and Morgenstern’s book, ‘Theory of Games and Economic Behavior,’ published in 1944.
We don’t have to think up a title till we get the doggone book written.
There is no rule book, no right or wrong; you just have to make it up and do the very best you can to care for your family.
The umlaut isn’t on my birth certificate. I had this book as a child called Chloe and Maude, and there was an umlaut on the e, and I said, I want that! It’s a little flair. Just to confuse people even more.
A book is never a masterpiece: it becomes one. Genius is the talent of a dead man.
I was getting in my own way. I would quit jobs and step out on hope and faith, and pray to God that I would book something that would allow me to just continue to act.
What we know is smartphones are everywhere and they are rich in data. What we know is that there are apps once downloaded by the consumer that will also in turn download the consumers’ contact book. Most consumers don’t want that to happen and don’t know it’s happening.
As an actor, the biggest compliment you can get, in my book is for someone to believe that you’re the character.
‘What is the use of a book’, thought Alice, ‘without pictures or conversations?’
There is no such thing as a moral or an immoral book. Books are well written, or badly written.
I’ve been told that having an Instagram account will help me book more roles, get more endorsement deals. It makes you more of a brand. But I’m not interested. I want to build my fan base through movies and movies alone.
Quite often in comic book movies, very good actresses are relegated to being the girlfriend or the helper or the sidekick or something.
I went to school, I went to college. I know how to read. Even though I lack common sense sometimes, I am book smart.
It is very, very easy not to be offended by a book. You just have to shut it.
I try to get in quiet time and book time, but really, the only time I ever get that is when I’m on an airplane – I have a fear of flying, but I actually love flying because it’s the only time I can sleep, and it’s the only time I get to read.
I read my first book on Woodrow Wilson at age 15, and I was hooked.
‘The UnAmericans’ is a compassionate and brilliantly rendered debut – and for a book set largely in the past, these stories feel essential to understanding the contemporary world in which we live.
All the women in my life have been librarians, English teachers and book sellers.
Quincy Jones’ autobiography ‘Q’ is very good. Because he’s a master at music, he’s one of our greatest composers, and its good for him to have a book and tell the good ole days when he was with Duke Ellington, Count Basie, Sarah Vaughan and Ray Charles.
I read a lot of obscure books and it is nice to open a book.
I’d never read ‘Lord of the Rings’ until I was asked to play Gandalf, so I didn’t really know it was a frightfully famous book.
I have a saying. ‘Never judge a book by its cover’. I say that because I don’t even know who Ozzy is. I wake up a new person every day.
Writing Part of the Scenery has been a very different experience. I have been reminded of people and events, real and imaginary which have been part of my life. This book is a celebration of the land which means so much to me.
All my life, I have taken inventory at intervals. For example, when I became a movie actor and suddenly I had to deal with fame, money and playing so many roles, I lost myself. I said, ‘Who am I?’ And I wrote my first book to deal with that, ‘The Ragman’s Son.’
I was in the South of France. I saw a Brownie on a school trip. She was holding up a book. It said on the front ‘rough guide’. I thought: ‘Yeah’ she’s not a looker.
A bad book is as much of a labor to write as a good one, it comes as sincerely from the author’s soul.
Read. Read. Read. Just don’t read one type of book. Read different books by various authors so that you develop different styles.
I like to sit down, relax, have a cup of coffee on the terrace and read a book. I like to travel the world – and I’m lucky to see so much through cycling.
I just feel that ‘The Color Purple,’ which was my 10th book, was a true gift from my ancestors.
It is all fiction, only autobiographical in the sense it is about a small town. None of the incidents in the book ever happened to me as a child. I didn’t have an eventful childhood.
I try to get to the beach every day. It brings sanity to my life. I’ll just sit and read a book and enjoy the quiet.
With every book, you go back to school. You become a student. You become an investigative reporter. You spend a little time learning what it’s like to live in someone else’s shoes.
A man’s got to take a lot of punishment to write a really funny book.
People tend to judge a book by its cover. I love being unexpected and gaining respect for who I am and not how I look.
Frankly, I would never like to write an autobiography because my life is an open book.
Spending waiting moments doing crossword puzzles or reading a book you brought yourself.
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.
Let us remember: One book, one pen, one child, and one teacher can change the world.
There is no end to education. It is not that you read a book, pass an examination, and finish with education. The whole of life, from the moment you are born to the moment you die, is a process of learning.
I never sell a book. I sell myself. And the way to sell yourself is to be an instrument of love.
An author is somebody who writes a story. It doesn’t matter if you’re a kid or if you’re a grown-up, it doesn’t matter if the book gets published and lots of people get to read it, or if you make just one copy and you share that book with one friend.
I like the idea that every page in every book can have a gem on it. It’s probably what I love most about writing – that words can be used in a way that’s like a child playing in a sandpit, rearranging things, swapping them around.
I don’t know who said that novelists read the novels of others only to figure out how they are written. I believe it’s true. We aren’t satisfied with the secrets exposed on the surface of the page: we turn the book around to find the seams.
If I read a book and it makes my whole body so cold no fire can ever warm me, I know that is poetry.
To me, at forty-four years old, my book was a search for truth and identity.
There’s no better book with which to defend the Bible than the Bible itself.
There is not one big cosmic meaning for all, there is only the meaning we each give to our life, an individual meaning, an individual plot, like an individual novel, a book for each person.
But when I lived as a monk, solitude is often spoken of as a strength. And so the first thing I’d recommend is finding one thing that you can do every single day that brings you joy. It may be reading a book you love. It may be looking at a beautiful piece of art.
I’m not able to work anymore as an actor and still at the level I would want to… you start to lose your memory. You start to lose your confidence. You start to lose your invention. So, that’s pretty much a closed book for me.
You know you’re getting old when all the names in your black book have M. D. after them.
I can’t put this down. I’m reading it in Spanish but I am still having English lessons. It is a motivational book about basketball legend Michael Jordan. His determination was inspiring. It helps me focus and drives me on.
The Bible is the book of my life. It’s the book I live with, the book I live by, the book I want to die by.
From the moment I picked your book up until I laid it down, I was convulsed with laughter. Someday I intend reading it.
A book should serve as the ax for the frozen sea within us.
A young man who knows and loves the Book of Mormon, who has read it several times, who has an abiding testimony of its truthfulness, and who applies its teachings will be able to stand against the wiles of the devil and will be a mighty tool in the hands of the Lord.
‘God’ – as revealed in his book of edicts and narratives is practically an idiot. He has nothing to say that any sensible person should want to listen to.
As adults, we’ve seen so much before that we often turn the pages of a picture book without really looking. Young children tend to look more carefully.
I can’t not put humor in a book.
A cookery book should be there for inspiration. Recipes should be a guideline, and they shouldn’t be cast in stone.
What makes a publisher decide to market a book to a particular audience is not the subject matter but the style.
When I’m sniffing around new territory, I often choose, rather randomly, one general book and then follow its bibliography and notes to other, more specialized works and to the primary source material.
‘Undertones of War’ by Edmund Blunden seems to get less attention than the memoirs of Siegfried Sassoon and Robert Graves, but it is a great book.
With ‘Seven Deadly Sins,’ there was a lot of personal stuff in there that I didn’t even realize I’d been carrying around for awhile. And a lot of guilt involved, a lot of emotion, a lot of depression. Once I was done writing that book, I was able to really let go of that stuff.
I feel certain that if, in our homes, parents will read from the Book of Mormon prayerfully and regularly, both by themselves and with their children, the spirit of that great book will come to permeate our homes and all who dwell therein.
By his own admission, Carson’s remarkable hand-eye coordination allowed him to soar as a surgeon, and he used that success to build a lucrative reputation as a purveyor of advice for young and old. His book for young people is titled ‘You Have a Brain.’
Real education should consist of drawing the goodness and the best out of our own students. What better books can there be than the book of humanity?
My website inspired me to create my book club and provides me with a creative outlet where I can write about things that interest me. It’s a platform where I can present ideas or new ventures and get feedback straight from the people who mean the most to me.
I’d done a lot of research in Hollywood and in academia. I love research and so I wanted to kind of ground the book in history, in things that I read that were universal and timeless and then kind of let my own experiences sort of filter through all of this history.
I’ve started working on a new album, I’m writing a new book… there are a lot of good things on the horizon.
My only writing ritual is to shave my head bald between writing the first and second drafts of a book. If I can throw away all my hair, then I have the freedom to trash any part of the book on the next rewrite.
Asking a critic to name his favorite book is like asking a butcher to name his favorite pig.
I really am an open book. I don’t keep anything in at all, which is good and bad.
I’m hot on the Jewish book club circuit. How many black authors do you know who can say that?
He’s this amazing ambassador for all superheroes. What we’ve made as a film not only examines that but is also an amazing adventure story. It’s been an honor to work on. As a comic book fan, Superman is like the Rosetta Stone of all superheroes.
I read ‘The Crystal Cave’ book by Mary Stewart, and I thought it was a really, really interesting part of the legend, in which Merlin could enter into the cave with these crystals and see reflections of the future in them and learn how to use that and harness those powers for himself.
A wonderful thing about a book, in contrast to a computer screen, is that you can take it to bed with you.
We’re Jews, my family, and Jews break down into two distinct subcultures: book Jews and money Jews. We were money Jews.
A book might be written on the injustice of the just.
And so, I mean, he declared war right there and then in so many words and Alex says later in the book, nobody in the White House from that point on had any doubt that we were going to bomb the mainland of Asia.
I’ve always written a little bit. I mean, I’ve written screenplays, and I’ve doctored my dialogue for years, and I’ve written speeches – I was a speechwriter on ‘The West Wing,’ so I like that kind of thing. But I never really thought I’d write a book.
You read a book, write a detailed review as proof you’ve read it, and they give you a badge. That’s where my competitive nature came out. Give me the badges! I would sit in the library all day, not ‘cos I loved reading, just because I needed those badges.
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.
Never index your own book.
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.
Characters are the key to a good book. It took me several novels to comprehend that.
A best-seller was a book which somehow sold well because it was selling well.
I can only write a book like ‘The Tin Drum’ or ‘From the Diary of a Snail’ at a special period of my life. The books came about because of how I felt and thought at the time.
‘Alpha’ is a very fast-moving book. It doesn’t lend itself to laborious introspection and the navel-gazing that some stories can fall prey to.
Your life story would not make a good book. Don’t even try.
A tablet replacing an exercise book is not innovation, it’s just a different way to make notes.
Won’t it be wonderful when black history and native American history and Jewish history and all of U.S. history is taught from one book. Just U.S. history.
People ask me if I ever thought of writing a children’s book. I say, ‘If I had a serious brain injury I might well write a children’s book’, but otherwise the idea of being conscious of who you’re directing the story to is anathema to me, because, in my view, fiction is freedom and any restraints on that are intolerable.
I have a lot of teenage readers and readers in their early twenties. My writing style appeals to them. And if they look at my picture on the back of the book, they don’t see someone who looks like their mother.
Having been unpopular in high school is not just cause for book publications.
It’s important, I think, for a writer of fiction to maintain an awareness of the pace and shape of the book as he’s writing it. That is, he should be making an object, not chattering.
When my mother read ‘The Joy Luck Club’, she was always complaining to me how she had to tell her friends that, no, she was not the mother or any of the mothers in the book.
In law school, we studied the famous book ‘Getting to Yes,’ co-written by the head of the Harvard Law School Negotiation Project.
‘The Lorax’ book was intended to be propaganda.
A historical romance is the only kind of book where chastity really counts.
I’m writing a book. I’ve got the page numbers done.
When I read a book I seem to read it with my eyes only, but now and then I come across a passage, perhaps only a phrase, which has a meaning for me, and it becomes part of me.
Reading is a conversation. All books talk. But a good book listens as well.
I find television very educating. Every time somebody turns on the set, I go into the other room and read a book.
I imagine a child. That child is me. I can reconstruct and vividly remember portions of my own childhood. I can see, taste, smell, feel, and hear them. Then what I do is, not write about that kid or about his world, but start to think of a book that would have pleased him.
The dirtiest book of all is the expurgated book.
All that I am I owe to Jesus Christ, revealed to me in His divine Book.
Our life is a book that writes itself and whose principal themes sometimes escape us. We are like characters in a novel who do not always understand what the author wants of them.
I like Burton Malkiel’s ‘A Random Walk Down Wall Street.’ He comes to the same conclusion that I do – that indexing is the way. My ‘Little Book of Common Sense Investing’ says pretty much the same thing.
The habit of breaking up one’s colour to make it brilliant dates from further back than Impressionism – Couture advocates it in a little book called ‘Causeries d’Atelier’ written about 1860 – it is part of the technique of Impressionism but used for quite a different reason.
I want to write so well that a person is 30 or 40 pages in a book of mine… before she realizes she’s reading.
Being on a book tour is like being on the seesaw when you’re a little kid. The excitement is in having someone to play with, and in rising up in the air, but then you’re at the mercy of those holding you down, and if it’s your older brother, or Paul Wolfowitz, they leap up, so that you crash down and get hurt.
I have argued about the future of fiction with jaded novelists, far-seeing postmodernists, technologists, television critics. The argument that future generations will not know the pleasures of the novel has been a staple of book reviewing since at least 1960.
My heart’s toward youth ministry, but I don’t know. I never would have thought I would have written a book. And God kind of directed that. So we’ll see what the next is.
People worry that gas prices are high and how they are affecting their pocket book. But they want to know about renewable energy. People are really starting to question things, and that’s made people look to the future in a positive way.
An autobiography is a book a person writes about his own life and it is usually full of all sorts of boring details.
The story of ‘A Dog’s Purpose’ flowed into me a set piece. The entire book was just there, as if I were connected to a streaming service, a novel wholly formed of character and plot. This has never happened to me before or since. I prayed for help and I got it. A gift.
Sometimes when I think how good my book can be, I can hardly breathe.
You’re never too old, too wacky, too wild, to pick up a book and read to a child.
Miss a meal if you have to, but don’t miss a book.
When I was 16, the first book I ever actually purchased with my own money, in fact, and had read on my own time was ‘Hunt for Red October’ by Tom Clancy.
I consider anybody a twerp who hasn’t read ‘Democracy in America’ by Alexis de Tocqueville. There can never be a better book than that one on the strengths and vulnerabilities inherent in our form of government.
In ‘The Plato Papers’ I wanted to get another perspective on the present moment by extrapolating into the distant future. So in that sense, there’s a definite similarity of purpose between a book set in the future and a book set in the past.
The mission of Booking is to empower people to experience the world. Whatever people want to do, wherever they want to go, they can book it with us.
A love of books, of holding a book, turning its pages, looking at its pictures, and living its fascinating stories goes hand-in-hand with a love of learning.
I think that I have every right to write a book. I think I’m interesting. I have perspective about me.
All Oprah needs is a good book. My only request when she’s building any house is, ‘Could I please have a TV in my bedroom?’
Japan, Germany, and India seem to me to have serious writers, readers, and book buyers, but the Netherlands has struck me as the most robust literary culture in the world.
The story follows the whole family. But pretty much all the characters who are in jail have written a book about it, so you’ve got their perspective of it, however skewed they want you to see it.
When I was writing ‘You Suck,’ in 2006, I constructed the diction of the book’s narrator, perky Goth girl Abby Normal, from what I read on Goth blog sites.
Well, I definitely have an artistic side to me as well. I write, I act, I draw. With that artistic mind I have, a lot of doors have opened for me. I can try to pursue, like – if it’s something using my writing skills, maybe a book. Or maybe if it’s my drawing skills, some clothing designs.
Green chemistry is replacing our industrial chemistry with nature’s recipe book. It’s not easy, because life uses only a subset of the elements in the periodic table. And we use all of them, even the toxic ones.
Follow your instincts. Do the kind of writing you love to do and do best. ‘Stiff’ was an oddball book – I mean, a funny book about cadavers? – and I worried that it would be too unconventional. In the end, that’s what has made it a success, I think.
My idea of a delicious time is to read a book that is wonderful. But the ruling passion of my life is being a seeker after truth and the divine.
Yeah, I’m an open book.
A good picture book should have events that are visually arresting – the pictures should call attention to what is happening in the story.
Dreams are illustrations from the book your soul is writing about you.
What public health really is is a trust. That’s why I used the term ‘Betrayal of Trust’ as the title of my book. It’s a trust between the government and the people.
What are we promoting in society? Well-behaved automatons that spew back what they learned in a book. That’s not science. You can get a parrot to do that.
I love Roger Deakin’s writing, and enjoyed making a programme about wild swimming for BBC4, inspired by his book about his own aquatic adventures, ‘Waterlog’.
Somebody said writing is easy, you just sit down at your typewriter and open a vein. It depends on the book. Some, I have to do quite a lot of research, which I like. Others are much closer to me.
The last book I read was Noam Chomsky on anarchism; maybe I will become an anarchist.
After years of practice, I can walk into a bookstore and understand its layout in a few seconds. I can glance at the spine of a book and make a good guess at its content from a number of signs.
I think I was 13 years old when my father put in my hands ‘The Spy Who Came in from the Cold.’ It was the first real adult book I ever read, and it opened a new world.
You need to recognize that the copyright date on a book reflects when it came out, not when it was written – assume that the information in the book is at least a year older than the copyright date, and possibly two.
Be kind and considerate with your criticism… It’s just as hard to write a bad book as it is to write a good book.
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.
I’m reading a book, because I’m brainy. No, it is a book – if you don’t know, it is like a blog except bigger.
I can never read this book, just like I can never see a movie that I wrote a screenplay for. I can read it and see it physically, but I can’t accurately judge it. I’m too close to it. If I read it ten times I’ll have ten different reactions.
I mean to say, this is the book and I really loathe it and I can’t imagine what a nice Jewish boy like me ever, how I ever got into this dreadful trade.
The music I listen, the book I read, and the people I meet; these are some things that keeps me going.
What did people do prior to cell phones? Read a book? If I’m stuck in a car, and I don’t have my phone, I’m like, ‘What am I doing?’ Car rides used to be one of my favorite things.
Life is like a book: one has to know when to turn the page.
I have trained my eye over and over ever since I was a kid. I was a bird watcher when I was a little boy. My grandmother gave me a bird book, and I got to like their colors.
A classic is a book that has never finished saying what it has to say.
I wish there was a museum of sorts for legends like Ellis R Dungan and many others who disappear with the turn of page in the book of time.
I am not like Stephen King, who writes one book, then writes another. I finish a book and go off and… look for wrecks. Then, six months later, I might start another book.
When I wrote the eight fairy tales that appear in ‘Horse, Flower, Bird’ I was working toward a completely new form of artistic expression, trying to create a new kind of tale that also felt vintage: innocent and childlike, but haunted. I tried to write a picture-less picture book.
I think a writer’s job is to provoke questions. I like to think that if someone’s read a book of mine, they’ve had – I don’t know what – the literary equivalent of a shower. Something that would start them thinking in a slightly different way, perhaps. That’s what I think writers are for.
I loathe computers more and more, so I have one I can shut down and shelve like a book.
I wrote a tennis book about Chris Evert and her then-husband, John Lloyd. It was called ‘Lloyd on Lloyd’ and became a No 1 bestseller.
I’ve learned a lot of tricks from working with a lot of great producers over the years, and I think I should write a book about it!
From the Book of Mormon, we learn how disciples of Christ live in times of war.
I got this book called ‘How to Write the Popular Song.’ I read that and went through all the things they suggested, and I learned how to do it.
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.
We live in capitalism, and capitalism is defined by the production line, and the production line is defined by specificity. If you see yourself as an artist, which I do, then you can’t be limited by that. You can’t let somebody tell you, ‘Well, you can only draw this kind of picture or write that kind of book.’
I read the ‘Kapoor & Sons’ script in a half hour, forty five minutes. Not because I skimming through it… I read it like a book. By the end, I was blown away. I picked up the phone and said, ‘This script is gold.’
Book sales and teens reading is always a fantastic thing, but we should also be celebrating and consuming the huge wealth of U.K. and U.K.-based writing and illustrating talent. Authors such as Charlie Higson, Darren Shan, Holly Smale, Tanya Byrne, Catherine Johnson, Sophie Mckenzie, to name but a few.
Every time I read a book, I find something new.
I think the players, I put in the book for example that we should go back to wood rackets, probably they laughed at me, I’m a dinosaur, but I think that you see these great players, have even more variety and you see more strategy, there’d be more subtlety.
Each new book is a tremendous challenge.
This is an important book, the critic assumes, because it deals with war. This is an insignificant book because it deals with the feelings of women in a drawing-room.
Books constitute capital. A library book lasts as long as a house, for hundreds of years. It is not, then, an article of mere consumption but fairly of capital, and often in the case of professional men, setting out in life, it is their only capital.
It was like a dream come true for me. When you write the book, it’s still intimate. It might have been a best-seller but it’s still my story, as I wrote it. The moment we or they make a movie, it’s not my story anymore. There’s a lot of letting go involved in the process.
I’ve loved traveling around the country and meeting people at book signings.
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.
You have to be careful not to use anything too colloquial or you date the book.
In the first book of my Discworld series, published more than 26 years ago, I introduced Death as a character; there was nothing particularly new about this – death has featured in art and literature since medieval times, and for centuries we have had a fascination with the Grim Reaper.
Reading a book about management isn’t going to make you a good manager any more than a book about guitar will make you a good guitarist, but it can get you thinking about the most important concepts.
A book is a version of the world. If you do not like it, ignore it; or offer your own version in return.
I never write a book unless I can’t help it. Something has to bother me, like a mosquito, until I have to do something to relieve the itch.
It’s the rare book that’s able to transport you in a way that a movie does.
We invest less in our friendships and expect more of friends than any other relationship. We spend days working out where to book for a romantic dinner, weeks wondering how to celebrate a partner or parent’s birthday, and seconds forgetting a friend’s important anniversary.
I remember reading the book ‘Rich Dad, Poor Dad,’ and I remember writing my goals down, and my number one goal in life was just to be a good husband and a good father someday. That was number one, as a 17-year-old kid.
To the man who reads ‘Scouting for Boys’ superficially, there is a disappointing lack of religion in the book. But to him who tries it in practice, the basic religion underlying it soon becomes apparent.
I thought my book was done, then we went to Hawaii and the whole last chapter happened.
I’ve been reading this little book. It’s called the Russian constitution. And it says that the only source of power in Russia is the people. So I don’t want to hear those who say we’re appealing to the authorities. Who’s the power here?
The power of a book lies in its power to turn a solitary act into a shared vision. As long as we have books, we are not alone.
For everything bad, there’s a million really exciting things, whether it’s someone puts out a really great book, there’s a new movie, there’s a new detective, the sky is unbelievably golden, or you have the best cup of coffee you ever had in your life.
I once read Updike after writing a first draft, and I wanted to put my own book on the fire. I’ve since learned to read utter crap while I’m writing: pulp is the thing.
There is nothing is more musical than a sunset. He who feels what he sees will find no more beautiful example of development in all that book which, alas, musicians read but too little – the book of Nature.
The most important thing about Spaceship Earth – an instruction book didn’t come with it.
Songs you can dip in and out of, but a book… well, it can overpower you.
A book has got smell. A new book smells great. An old book smells even better. An old book smells like ancient Egypt.
I know every trick in the book, in terms of schemes and fraud.
Why buy a book when you can join a library.
My first popular book, ‘A Brief History of Time,’ aroused a great deal of interest, but many found it difficult to understand.
I remember, when I went away to college at Southern Methodist University in Dallas, my aunt sent me a book with the rules of being a Southern Belle. One of the rules was to never wear white after Labor Day. Fashion has a lot to do with confidence and making up your own rules.
I’m not really a book person, to be honest.
Style and Structure are the essence of a book; great ideas are hogwash.
When you sell a man a book, you don’t sell him 12 ounces of paper and ink and glue – you sell him a whole new life.
My life is an open book.
Everyone thinks they’re going to write one book of poems or one novel.
I did this book ‘Harvest for Hope,’ and I learned so much about food. And one thing I learned is that we have the guts not of a carnivore, but of an herbivore. Herbivore guts are very long because they have to get the last bit of nutrition out of leaves and things.
Now there is one outstandingly important fact regarding Spaceship Earth, and that is that no instruction book came with it.
I never learned anything at all in school and didn’t read a book for pleasure until I was 19 years old.
To me a book is a message from the gods to mankind; or, if not, should never be published at all.
Your love to me was like an unread book.
Nature is a book, a letter, a fairy tale (in the philosophical sense) or whatever you want to call it.
I am bipolar, and I am proud. And that is why I wanted to write a book. To shine a light on mental illness, to be vulnerable about the days I let it take control and paid dearly for it, and to tell anyone fighting a similar battle: You are not alone. You are not broken.
The Arc de Triomphe, the Eiffel Tower. They’re monumental. They’re straight out of Page 52 in your school history book.
I’m not a very glamorous person. I like to just sit alone in a room and read a book or meditate.
What’s interesting about ‘The Brave and Bold #85’ is it’s a book in which I re-created, or created, Green Arrow.
Then one day I read about a book that said that the church is the only army that shoots its wounded.
I thought a book on miracles might be a great idea, but just because it’s a great idea doesn’t mean I’m supposed to do it. But my editor persisted, and eventually I thought, ‘He’s right. I should write this book.’
In many ways, it’s easier to write a book. You have more latitude with structure, and you have the freedom to luxuriate within the internal lives and musings of your characters. But where a screenplay does not always demand great prose, a novel lives or dies by it.
I wrote a book of essays about New York called ‘The Colossus of New York,’ but it’s not about – you know, when I’m writing about rush hour or Central Park, it’s not a black Central Park, it’s just Central Park, and it’s not a black rush hour, it’s just rush hour.
A cashmere knit is like a book. It is something to save and go back to time after time. It is the feeling of an embrace.
Creating a book and creating a collection involve a lot of editing.
A book must be the ax for the frozen sea within us.
There are two methods for the literary study of any book – the first being the study of its thought and emotion; the second only that of its workmanship. A student of literature should study some of the Bible from both points of view.
‘Tulip Fever’ did change my life. It did that thing that sometimes happens when a book takes off – it opened doors on to whole other worlds.
He who looks the higher is the more highly distinguished, and turning over the great book of nature (which is the proper object of philosophy) is the way to elevate one’s gaze.
The good parts of a book may be only something a writer is lucky enough to overhear or it may be the wreck of his whole damn life and one is as good as the other.
I’ll always be reading a good book. I don’t have, like, specific genre tastes or anything or things that I kind of get hooked on, reading genre books or anything like that. It’s just really anything anyone kind of recommends or is going around or I hear is good.
Don’t join the book burners. Do not think you are going to conceal thoughts by concealing evidence that they ever existed.
Nothing more rapidly inclines a person to go into a monastery than reading a book on etiquette. There are so many trivial ways in which it is possible to commit some social sin.
The publishing of a book is a worldwide event. The attempt to suppress a book is a worldwide event.
The book you don’t read won’t help.
The good of a book lies in its being read. A book is made up of signs that speak of other signs, which in their turn speak of things. Without an eye to read them, a book contains signs that produce no concepts; therefore it is dumb.
Once, in London, the BBC asked me what was my favorite English book. I said Alice in Wonderland.
What about the hero of The House on the Strand? What did it mean when he dropped the telephone at the end of the book? I don’t really know, but I rather think he was going to be paralysed for life. Don’t you?
To me, the Quran is a research book.
After reading the Elon Musk book and getting a Tesla – he is at the top of my list of inspiring founders.
Never think you can’t do something. I definitely never thought I could write a book, and even after I started writing it, I was like, ‘Oh my God, how am I gonna write a book?’ Just set your sights high and reach for the stars. Go live your dreams, and never think you can’t.
I had been plunged into a different world. I found myself spending half my time answering weird questions on book tours in the Midwest. People would stand up and explain to me the situation in their office and ask me whether they should resign or not.
I wish one time in my life I could do what other writers do… get me a villa in Spain and go there to write a book.
More generally, I made an effort to leave out things that weren’t relevant to the main narrative themes of the book, namely that there were two sides to Steve Jobs: the romantic, poetic, countercultural rebel on one side, and the serious businessperson on the other.
One of the great upsides to a national book tour is the chance to break out of television’s cocoon and interact directly with the American people.
Writing music is just like writing a book.
You wouldn’t try and make a cake without a recipe book. Careers are just the same.
My favorite book was ‘The Giving Tree.’
The Christian Bible is a symbolic book, not a literal one. The one Christians know as Jesus was actually a symbol for the sun. Ancient sun worshippers believed the sun died at the end of the winter solstice and then three days later it would be reborn at the start of its cycle – December 25.
The second book was probably the result of the relationship I was in at the time. We were only going to be compatible for a minute, and I think we both knew it. It’s like how you can be a different person on vacation, but you know all along you’re just visiting that mindset.
I really love ‘Bridget Jones’s Diary’ – and I love the book, too. You wonder how it ever got made into a movie. She’s supposed to be chubby, and two of the hottest guys ever are straight-up fighting over her?
You can never step into the same book twice, because you are different each time you read it.
I am so excited to announce that I have written a book. I have actually written it myself with no ghost writer, just me! I never thought it would be possible but I have done it.
Making a mix CD – albeit slightly old school – is generally a pretty cool gift and something I like to receive, or giving someone a book that moved you. Writing an inscription inside makes it even better.
I told myself that I wanted to be a motivational speaker, I wanted to write a book, graduate college, have my own family, and have my own career.
I have some friends, some honest friends, and honest friends are few; My pipe of briar, my open fire, A book that’s not too new.
I always wanted to do a baseball book; I love baseball. The problem is that a very large part of my following is in non-baseball playing countries.
I was just on the edge of getting married, and I was frenzied at the prospect of this great step in my life after having been a bachelor for so long. And I really wanted to take my mind off of the agony, and so I decided to sit down and write a book.
How could I make a little book, when I have seen enough to make a dozen large books?
The experience of reading a printed comic book will never change, but now, thanks to the digital age, there are many different ways to enjoy the same story. Digital comic books, of course, can be interactive in many different ways, allowing the reader to feel like a participant in the story.
I read. I order books from the States. I literally go into bookstores, close my eyes, and take things off the shelf. If I don’t like the book after a bit, I don’t finish it. But I like to be surprised.
I was in Kenya when I read ‘Catch-22,’ and I associate this book that has nothing to do with Kenya – whenever I think of ‘Catch-22,’ I think of Nairobi.
If you really want to know yourself, start by writing a book.
Actors are agents of change. A film, a piece of theater, a piece of music, or a book can make a difference. It can change the world.
With the Truman book, I wrote the entire account of his experiences in World War I before going over to Europe to follow his tracks in the war. When I got there, there was a certain satisfaction in finding I had it right – it does look like that.
A scholar is like a book written in a dead language. It is not every one that can read in it.
While other kids were out playing and doing healthy things, I read an ancient judo book with a neck hold that was fatal to so many people, they finally dropped it from judo.
I’m always reading the next book. Taking notes. Highlighting, researching, studying. It doesn’t stop.
A classic is a book that doesn’t have to be written again.
I start each book when it’s ready and never before.
I’ve come to think of Europe as a hardcover book, America as the paperback version.
I’ve started doing book reviews for Barnes & Noble! They saw that I did a lot of book reviews on the site, and they figured that it might not be a bad thing if they got me to do some for them as well. I gave them five categories I’d be interested in reviewing, from art to fiction to music.
Everywhere I have sought rest and not found it, except sitting in a corner by myself with a little book.
Every beginning is only a sequel, after all, and the book of events is always open halfway through.
Of course, there are those critics – New York critics as a rule – who say, ‘Well, Maya Angelou has a new book out and of course it’s good but then she’s a natural writer.’ Those are the ones I want to grab by the throat and wrestle to the floor because it takes me forever to get it to sing. I work at the language.
I can easily conceive, most Holy Father, that as soon as some people learn that in this book which I have written concerning the revolutions of the heavenly bodies, I ascribe certain motions to the Earth, they will cry out at once that I and my theory should be rejected.
With the publication of my book, Melania and Me: The Rise and Fall of My Friendship With the First Lady,’ I have exercised my right to free expression.
There have been articles saying that all women need to read my book. I ask, why not all men? In fact, that would be even more valuable because we women want to sit down with men and tell them – this is how we feel, this is what we go through.
The words of my book nothing, the drift of it everything.
To have a successful writing career, you must be willing to sacrifice a great deal. The book, the deadline come first before anything else. Writing is not a job; it is a lifestyle, and it is a roller-coaster ride of highs and lows. You need self-confidence and an iron carapace.
The dumbest childhood vow I ever made was to finish every book I started.
‘Tis pleasant, sure, to see one’s name in print. A book’s a book, although there’s nothing in ‘t.
What he’s done is recognise the cinematic nature of the book. It’s beautifully realised – it’s a beat film.
I have come to understand and appreciate writers much more recently since I started working on a book last fall. Before that, I thought golf writers got up every morning, played a round of golf, had lunch, showed up for our last three holes and then went to dinner.
My philosophy is that I’m an artist. I perform an art not with a paint brush or a camera. I perform with bodily movement. Instead of exhibiting my art in a museum or a book or on canvas, I exhibit my art in front of the multitudes.
I’m writing a new book right now that is like an erotica manifesto.
My dad was really complex, and I was raised by that. My mom is really bright – very book bright – and so those things collide… I learned that I could put all of that stuff together in the world of acting, and I could make a dollar at it.
The Word of God is so much broader than people are giving it credit for. Look at Proverbs, a book written on how to live.
I’m the world ‘Guinness Book of Records’ holder of 1,749 hugs in one hour. My arms fell off.
I was reading a book… ‘the history of glue’ – I couldn’t put it down.
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?’
Let your daughter have first of all the book of Psalms for holiness of heart, and be instructed in the Proverbs of Solomon for her godly life.
As a 14-year-old with anxiety, to have read about that in a book would have helped me so much.
If you’re a retailer and know that once a year you’re going to get Mary Higgins Clark’s book on a given date, you’re going to have an awful lot of copies out there in time for that. You’d have to be simple-minded not to do that – although bookselling prior to 1950 never made that connection.
A book is a gift you can open again and again.
The book is called ‘A House in the Sky’ because during the very, very darkest times, that was how I survived. I had to find a safe place to go in my mind where there was no violence being done to my body and where I could reflect on the life I had lived and the life that I still wanted to live.
I’ve heard people on panels say, ‘You must have a Web site. You need to tweet. Repeat the title of your book constantly,’ and I just want to say, ‘Shut up. Everything you’re saying is wrong.’ People will know instantly if your only motivation for tweeting is to sell books.
A good book is the best of friends, the same today and forever.
‘Mandie and the Secret Tunnel’ – the book and now the movie – pits a very young woman against forces she cannot control and events she cannot possibly know about. She’s in way over her head, and you’re pulling for her from the opening scene.
Writing my first book, I think in hindsight I went into it saying, ‘It’s gonna sell.’ I was earning enough to scrape by sometime around a book or two before ‘Tell No One.’ I moved up from $50,000 to $75,000, then $150,000 for each book. I had never thought I would be doing anything else. I had enough encouragement.
With things like ‘Dragon Ball,’ in the case of fight scenes, I’d take the panel layout across two pages when the book is opened and alter it by angling them, and making them bigger or smaller, to give movement to the panels themselves.
You know, I’m pretty much an open book.
Our coach was absolutely out of his head. He must have read Bear Bryant’s book. We had 78 players out. The first day 35 quit. Twenty quit the second day. We ended with 17 players. It was depressing.
I often have the impression that the book I’ve just finished isn’t satisfied: that it rejects me because I haven’t successfully completed it. Because there is no going back, I’m forced to begin a new book so I can finally complete the previous one.
I start every book with something that outrages me. I’m outraged by the FBI, the CIA, and computers that seem to have catalogued our lives. Power too often is accompanied by irresponsibility.
Everyone has a book inside of them – but it doesn’t do any good until you pry it out.
In the early ’90s, I was finishing up my adolescence. I visited my local comic-book store on a weekly basis, and one week I found a book on the stands called ‘Xombi,’ published by Milestone Media.
A young woman who knows and loves the Book of Mormon, who has read it several times, who has an abiding testimony of its truthfulness, and who applies its teachings will be able to stand against the wiles of the devil and will be a mighty tool in the hands of the Lord.
I feel happy and secure when I’m on my bed with a good book… I forget everything which is terrible in our world.
There is that lovely feeling of one reader telling another, ‘You must read this.’ I’ve always wanted to write a book like that, with the sense that you are contributing to the discourse in middle America, a discourse that begins at a book club in a living room, but then spreads. That is meaningful to me.
Is ‘The Wind in the Willows’ a children’s book? Is ‘Alice in Wonderland?’ Is ‘Treasure Island?’ These are masterpieces which we read with pleasure as children, but with how much more pleasure when we are grown-up.
The comic book world is so dangerous, you know what I mean? You say one thing and people – they’re ravenous – they are very opinionated fans. But they’re great fans.
The joke in our family is that we can cry reading the phone book.
There is no Frigate like a book to take us lands away nor any coursers like a page of prancing Poetry.
The book is called ‘Most Talkative,’ because I was voted most talkative in high school. And I’ve never stopped talking. My mouth has been my greatest asset and my biggest Achilles’ heel.
I live my life like an open book, even though it’s open on the wrong page.
The Social Register is a nice address book for some people, but that’s about it.
I think of life as a good book. The further you get into it, the more it begins to make sense.
For a true writer, each book should be a new beginning where he tries again for something that is beyond attainment. He should always try for something that has never been done or that others have tried and failed. Then sometimes, with great luck, he will succeed.
I didn’t follow the whole ‘X-Men’ story because it got too complicated. I’d pick up a comic book and have no idea what was going on.
I have an ambition to write a great book, but that’s really a competition with myself. I’ve noticed that a lot of young writers, people in all media, want to be famous but they don’t really want to do anything. I can’t think of anything less worth striving for than fame.
If there’s a book you really want to read, but it hasn’t been written yet, then you must write it.
Finishing a book is just like you took a child out in the back yard and shot it.
The book is like the spoon, scissors, the hammer, the wheel. Once invented, it cannot be improved. You cannot make a spoon that is better than a spoon… The book has been thoroughly tested, and it’s very hard to see how it could be improved on for its current purposes.
Almost any poll of regular churchgoers will reveal that their favorite book in the New Testament is the Gospel of John. It is the book that is most often used at Christian funerals.
In the fairy tale the painting represents the here and now. The book is actually divided into five sections, through which the key character, the muse, leads us.
A passenger on a road journey is in the hands of a driver; a reader embarking on a book is in the hands of a narrator.
While Fledging is a different type of book, The Parable series serve as cautionary tales. I wrote the Parable books because of the direction of the country. You can call it save the world fiction, but it clearly doesn’t save anything.
I’m going to write a book, continue acting, continue motivational speaking and just share with people who I am and what I’ve learned in my second chance of life and pass it on to people in their first chance of life.
Someone asked me, if I were stranded on a desert island what book would I bring… ‘How to Build a Boat.’
‘Weedflower’ was already in the copyediting phase when I heard about the Newbery award, so it didn’t really influence my writing of that book, but since then, I have become more aware of having an audience.
I have two daughters: One an open book, one a locked box. So the question of privacy is a challenging one. How much do kids need? How much should we give? How do we prepare them to live in a world where the very notion of privacy opens a generational chasm?
Everywhere I go, the kids call me ‘the book lady.’ The older I get, the more appreciative I seem to be of the ‘book lady’ title. It makes me feel more like a legitimate person, not just a singer or an entertainer. But it makes me feel like I’ve done something good with my life and with my success.
I keep one simple rule that I only move in one direction – I write the book straight through from beginning to end. By following time’s arrow, I keep myself sane.
I had assumed I’d pack my bags and head elsewhere after ‘Constellation,’ but Chechnya is creeping its way into the margins of my second book.
Boxing is the only sport you can get your brain shook, your money took and your name in the undertaker book.
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.
When you save book reports, art projects and put them in a scrapbook, it shows a kid you care and you are taking an interest in their lives.
The first thing I did when I sold my book was buy a new wedding ring for my wife and asked her to marry me all over again.
It’s a very good historical book about history.
The reason I have LGBT fans is because I’m an open book; they’re attracted to that.
A close associate of his gave an interview in which the book was described as quotes ‘fiction from being to end’. I suffered trial by tabloid for a couple of weeks, lots of insults in the press, in the columns – this man should be put in the tower and so on.
A book is a book is a book.
No other human being, no woman, no poem or music, book or painting can replace alcohol in its power to give man the illusion of real creation.
If you’re going to abridge a book in the author’s own words, you can’t go sticking your own in.
There’s a popular concept of ‘intelligence’ as book smarts, like calculus or chess, as opposed to, say, social skills. So people say that ‘it takes more than intelligence to succeed in human society.’ But social skills reside in the brain, not the kidneys.
If you never ask yourself any questions about the meaning of a passage, you cannot expect the book to give you any insight you do not already possess.
You can’t get a cup of tea big enough or a book long enough to suit me.
I can tell you, honest friend, what to believe: believe life; it teaches better that book or orator.
Having your book turned into a movie is like seeing your oxen turned into bouillon cubes.
I’m an open book.
This idea that a book can either be about character and feeling, or about politics and idea, is just a false binary. Ideas are an expression of the feelings and the intense emotions we hold about the world.
I would say I’m an inspirational guidelines book. You can take my life story or scenarios or songs and relate to them and apply them to your everyday life.
Experts on romance say for a happy marriage there has to be more than a passionate love. For a lasting union, they insist, there must be a genuine liking for each other. Which, in my book, is a good definition for friendship.
In general, a writer would like to think that the best book that he has written is the book that he is writing, and the next book will be even better. Maybe if this is not true, it is very useful to keep the illusion alive.
No matter where I’m going, I always have sunglasses, a book, and some gum in my carry-on.
What do we tell our children? Haste makes waste. Look before you leap. Stop and think. Don’t judge a book by its cover. We believe that we are always better off gathering as much information as possible and spending as much time as possible in deliberation.
In baseball, democracy shines its clearest. The only race that matters is the race to the bag. The creed is the rule book. And color, merely something to distinguish one team’s uniform from another’s.
Who kills a man kills a reasonable creature, God’s image, but thee who destroys a good book, kills reason its self.
I think things just happen to people. That’s healthier, I feel, than believing there’s some grand scheme where your story is already inscribed in the Book of Life. Books get rewritten.
The Old Testament is responsible for more atheism, agnosticism, disbelief – call it what you will – than any book ever written. It has emptied more churches than all the counter-attractions of cinema, motor-bicycle and golf course.
When you are old and gray and full of sleep, and nodding by the fire, take down this book and slowly read, and dream of the soft look your eyes had once, and of their shadows deep.
I’m pretty much an open book.
I do not recall a Jewish home without a book on the table.
To be quite honest, I’ve been very blessed when I’ve worked with Hollywood. The studios that have purchased my work to be adapted to film have really liked the work and wanted to stay as close as they could to what the book was.
I must say I find television very educational. The minute somebody turns it on, I go to the library and read a good book.
‘The Sun Also Rises’ by Ernest Hemingway is my favorite book. You feel manly reading it.
Obsession led me to write. It’s been that way with every book I’ve ever written. I become completely consumed by a theme, by characters, by a desire to meet a challenge.
There is no way that the Fourth Gospel was written by John Zebedee or by any of the disciples of Jesus. The author of this book is not a single individual, but is at least three different writers/editors, who did their layered work over a period of 25 to 30 years.
Climbing Mount Everest was the biggest mistake I’ve ever made in my life. I wish I’d never gone. I suffered for years of PTSD and still suffer from what happened. I’m glad I wrote a book about it. But, you know, if I could go back and relive my life, I would never have climbed Everest.
You might be a redneck if… the blue book value of your truck goes up and down depending on how much gas it has in it.
To read a paper book is another experience: you can do it on a ship, on the branch of a tree, on your bed, even if there is a blackout.
Writing about 2,000 words in three hours every morning, ‘Casino Royale’ dutifully produced itself. I wrote nothing and made no corrections until the book was finished. If I had looked back at what I had written the day before I might have despaired.
I’m so grateful to everyone who has bought a copy of ‘Girl Online.’ I love that so many of my viewers are enjoying the book!
The new year stands before us, like a chapter in a book, waiting to be written. We can help write that story by setting goals.
Writing is a solitary experience. I’m extremely superstitious. If I talk about the book or name the title out loud before finishing, I feel the energy I need to write will be drained. It’s so intimate, I can’t even share it with my wife.
For years, I meant to read ‘Arabian Sands’, Wilfred Thesiger’s account of two punishing camel journeys during the late 1940s across Southern Arabia’s Empty Quarter. Now that I have, I can sheepishly join the chorus of those who revere the book as one of the half dozen greatest works of modern English travel writing.
The turning point was when I hit my 30th birthday. I thought, if really want to write, it’s time to start. I picked up the book How to Write a Novel in 90 Days. The author said to just write three pages a day, and I figured, I can do this. I never got past Page 3 of that book.
I didn’t know I was poor, growing up, because everyone was in the same boat. I couldn’t have bikes. It never really bothered me, but I could have any book. I loved school; I loved learning. Yeah, I never cared for possessions. I still don’t, really.
Why do I do this every Sunday? Even the book reviews seem to be the same as last week’s. Different books same reviews.
One of the seminal moments I remember as a young punk is, when Roy Thomas was doing an editorial read-through of a book before it went to press, and being so gob-smacked by it, he just canceled it right there.
Unbeknown to me, my manager, under my very nose (in a crouching position) has all these years been secretly compiling a book from my correspondence. I often wondered what she was doing in my office. She never did a stroke of work for me. All the time, I have been working for her.
No man has ceased to believe in God before having decided that he should not exist; no book would produce atheism, and no book can restore faith.
I love the book ‘Devil in the White City.’
Practically everybody in New York has half a mind to write a book, and does.
‘The Man Who Never Was,’ by Ewen Montagu, remains the best book about wartime espionage written by an active participant – incomplete, and dry in parts, it nonetheless summons up the ingenuity and sheer eccentricity of those who played this strange and dangerous game.
I realised I’d never climb Everest but thought I could still write a book.
My husband, a.k.a. Swede, and I both come from athletic backgrounds, so once we identified the goal – get book published – we attacked it. At any given time, I would have my writing out in 25 various forms – either contests, mentoring critiques, agent/publisher queries, etc.
People had this image of the Jacksons as the perfect American family and I destroyed that image. But what people have to understand is writing that book was very healing for me.
I read over a hundred books a year and have done so since I was fifteen years old, and every book I’ve read has taught me something.
The ideas I stand for are not mine. I borrowed them from Socrates. I swiped them from Chesterfield. I stole them from Jesus. And I put them in a book. If you don’t like their rules, whose would you use?
Information is not knowledge, and knowledge is not wisdom. Reading – even browsing – an old book can yield sustenance denied by a database search. Patience is a virtue, gluttony a sin.
I meet people at book signings. My record now, for signing, is ten and a half hours in one sitting.
I don’t know why Sinclair Lewis fell in love with me. He didn’t get even the slightest response from me. But his letters were lovely. And the poems he wrote me were lovely. I used some of them in my book.
Living is like tearing through a museum. Not until later do you really start absorbing what you saw, thinking about it, looking it up in a book, and remembering – because you can’t take it in all at once.
The first book I fell in love with was ‘Little Toot,’ the story of an adorable tugboat operating out of New York Harbor.
Sometimes some of these little side excursions are useful and I manage to fit them in the book somewhere.
If you write a book about a bygone period that lies east of the Mississippi River, then it’s a historical novel. If it’s west of the Mississippi, it’s a western, a different category. There’s no sense to it.
Time travel may be achieved one day, or it may not. But if it is, it should not require any fundamental change in world-view, at least for those who broadly share the world view I am presenting in this book.
Ideally a book would have no order to it, and the reader would have to discover his own.
I enjoyed doing the gag covers better than the story ones because they were usually simpler. A cover based on an incident in the plot took a great deal of staging to tell a little story that was still part of the book. And it had to make sense on its own.
A real book is not one that we read, but one that reads us.
I taught myself to read when I was three by comparing the letters in my Mother Goose book with the rhymes I had memorised.
I want to create a collection, almost like a trilogy of sorts. Whereas ‘Milk and Honey’ was very much like holding a mirror up to yourself, the second book is turning that mirror around and fixing it on the world. The book is a reflection of the times we are in.
If you’re going to call a book ‘The Politically Incorrect Guide to American History,’ readers will expect some serious carrying on about race, and Thomas Woods Jr. does not disappoint.
If a man writes a book, let him set down only what he knows. I have guesses enough of my own.
When you write your first book aged 25 or so, you have 25 years of experience, albeit much of it juvenile experience. The second book comes after an extra year sitting in bookshops. Pretty soon, you begin to run on empty.
The covers of this book are too far apart.
A novel ensures that we can look before and after, take action at whatever pace we choose, read again and again, skip and go back. The story in a book is humble and serviceable, available, friendly, is not switched on and off but taken up and put down, lasts a lifetime.
The two things I was positive about in life were that I was going to be a teacher at a boarding school or an operative with the CIA posted abroad. I could write a book about all the things I was sure about.
The book is not really the container for the book. The book itself is the narrative. It’s the thing that people create.
Certainly in the case of ‘Kill Your Friends,’ a book I wrote more than 10 years ago, I routinely meet interviewers who appear to know the book better than I do. But still, you have to talk about it.
Usually a feeling of disappointment follows the book, because what I hoped to write is not what I actually accomplished. However, it becomes a motivation to write the next book.
What a book a devil’s chaplain might write on the clumsy, wasteful, blundering, low, and horribly cruel work of nature!
I don’t read ‘chick lit,’ fantasy or science fiction but I’ll give any book a chance if it’s lying there and I’ve got half an hour to kill.
If you want a favorite book, Orson Scott Card’s ‘Ender’s Game’. You’ll be hooked. I think he’s written like twelve or thirteen.
I think Stevie Wonder could sing the phone book and manage to make me cry.
My ‘Book of Prayer’ is the most important thing I carry. If I’m tense about something or need to pray for protection for my kids, it always helps.
I don’t have a process; I just feel it. My book on acting would be very short.
When I see Kate Moss out and about, I think she looks more beautiful than when her hairdresser and make-up artist try and make her look like something else. And I remember when Madonna first asked Versace to book me to shoot a campaign with her, she came to see me wearing hardly any make-up, and she looked incredible.
I believe that a government has only one religion – India first. A government has only one holy book – our Constitution. A government has only one kind of devotion – towards nation.
A reader can never tell if it’s a real thimble or an imaginary thimble, because by the time you’re reading it, they’re the same. It’s a thimble. It’s in the book.
To produce a mighty book, you must choose a mighty theme. No great and enduring volume can ever be written on the flea, though many there be that have tried it.
I don’t think it’s the writer’s job to give answers or to give opinions. In fact, when a writer has answers, I think the work ends up being corrupted. It becomes didactic. What a book does is share a consciousness and invite people to explore the questions as best as you can.
‘Extraordinary’ is an original fairy tale, a contemporary story. But like a traditional fairy tale, it heads quickly into frightening, bloody territory. I am afraid for my book, as it goes out alone into the world, just as I was frightened for Phoebe as I wrote and rewrote her story.
Oh, I just want what we all want: a comfortable couch, a nice beverage, a weekend of no distractions and a book that will stop time, lift me out of my quotidian existence and alter my thinking forever.
I’ve always believed in writing without a collaborator, because where two people are writing the same book, each believes he gets all the worry and only half the royalties.
I would never want to hurt anyone by writing a book.
Bliss is the ocean, a towel on the sand, the sun out, the chance to swim in waves or walk dragging a stick behind you, a good book, a cold drink.
These days it seems that every big, new, heavily promoted children’s book is rather like the ghost of poor old Jacob Marley. Each one comes trailing a long, clanking chain of references – in the form of overexcited press releases and slightly hysterical jacket blurbs – to bestsellers of a supposedly similar nature.
My first book was called, ‘Mountain, Get Out of My Way,’ where I did an autobiographical sketch, if you will, looking back at myself and looking back at things in my life, and juxtaposing them against things that are happening in other people’s lives and trying to be motivational.
No one would want to read a book in which I explain the science of cloning because it would be very dull and it would also make no sense.
‘The Silence of the Lambs’ is my favourite book, favourite film.
I’ve found I get big things done when I’m on airplanes or in hotel rooms. It’s a total needle-mover to book a fantastic room in a place you adore and then put the ‘do not disturb’ on the phone and door for a week.
When you’re writing a book, with people in it as opposed to animals, it is no good having people who are ordinary, because they are not going to interest your readers at all. Every writer in the world has to use the characters that have something interesting about them, and this is even more true in children’s books.
In my college years, I would retreat to our summer house for two weeks in June to read a novel a day. How exciting it was, after pouring my coffee and making myself comfortable on the porch, to open the next book on the roster, read the first sentences, and find myself on the platform of a train station.
Every song has a composer, every book has an author, every car has a maker, every painting has a painter, and every building has a builder. So it isn’t irrational to take this simple logic a little further and say that nature must have had a Maker. It would be irrational to believe that it made itself.
It took me 11 years to struggle through one dumb book, and every day you just want to give up. But you don’t find out you’re an artist because you do something really well.
You know, after filming the movie the book was still just as big. I think it was actually bigger. I think Stephen King went back and wrote extra pages. He’s fantastic.
I think we have a great deal of mythology around writing. We believe that only a few people can really do it. I wrote a book called ‘The Right to Write.’ In it, I argued that all of us have the capacity to write. That it’s as normal to write as it is to speak.
I told my whole life story in my book.
If I read a book that impresses me, I have to take myself firmly by the hand, before I mix with other people; otherwise they would think my mind rather queer.
I need to add that my work on multiple intelligences received a huge boost in 1995 when Daniel Goleman published his book on emotional intelligence. I am often confused with Dan. Initially, though Dan and I are longtime friends, this confusion irritated me.
When I was eight, I would look at the cover of the ‘Ghost Rider’ comic book in my little home in Long Beach, California, and I couldn’t get my head around how something that scary could also be good. To me it was my first philosophical awakening – ‘How is this possible, this duality?’
I bought a book of Mark Twain quotes. That’s about my speed. I’ll read a couple quotes and put it down.
Software is becoming no different than a videotape or a record album or a paperback book, and not all of us are ready for that change.
Every time there’s a revolution, it comes from somebody reading a book about revolution. David Walker wrote a book and Nat Turner did his thing.
The comments I most appreciate come from ordinary readers who’ve happened on one of my books at some time of stress in their lives, and who actually credit the book with helping them through a bad time. It’s happened a few times in forty years.
The Antichrist is often identified with the second beast in the Book of Revelation that arises from the land, the beast that tries to make everyone worship the power of evil.
I wrote in the book very specifically what I wanted to write about, period, and left it at.
Most of my life, I feel I have been Unicycling at the Edge of the Abyss! If fact, this will be the name of my book if I ever write one, or a one man stand up routine. I have used it as the name of a collection of my musical compositions written during the ’90s. It fits the scary journey I feel I’ve been on.
‘The Da Vinci Code’ is the most popular book of our times.
I’m opening a store at the end of the month in the New York meatpacking district. I’m launching a line of bedding this summer, and I am writing a book that will be out next January.
What is in question is a kind of book reviewing which seems to be more and more popular: the loose putting down of opinions as though they were facts, and the treating of facts as though they were opinions.
I work hard and I party hard. When I go to work, I know what I am doing and I do it to the best of my abilities. When I party, I take exactly the same rule book with me.
Why do we take pleasure in gruesome death, neatly packaged as a puzzle to which we may find a satisfactory solution through clues – or if we are not clever enough, have it revealed by the all-powerful tale-teller at the end of the book? It is something to do with being reduced to, and comforted by, playing by the rules.
Great nations write their autobiographies in three manuscripts – the book of their deeds, the book of their words and the book of their art.
I started writing at the kitchen table after midnight. It took ten months to finish that first book; I sent it to a publisher and I got some kind of prize, so it was like a dream – I was surprised to find it happening.
Everything that I do is very autobiographical. I’m trying to be as much of an open book as possible and give the audience every single piece of me.
I just like the comic book sensibility. If I can turn them into films and TV series, that’s just icing on the cake.
It’s insulting to believe that teens should have a different kind of book than an adult should.
Picture books are for everybody at any age, not books to be left behind as we grow older. The best ones leave a tantalising gap between the pictures and the words, a gap that is filled by the reader’s imagination, adding so much to the excitement of reading a book.
I found a great book called ‘Slang Through the Ages’ by Jonathon Green. It’s basically a thesaurus of historical slang, and had lots of great old uses.
People like that I wrote a book – that’s cute, but oh, making a business out of it? That’s not nice.
‘Nimona’ is about identity and if who you are is defined by what you look like. It’s not a book about body image at all, but I would be lying if I said that wasn’t in there even at the conception of it.
I propose to construct a new chart for navigating, on which I shall delineate all the sea and lands of the Ocean in their proper positions under their bearings; and further, I propose to prepare a book, and to put down all as it were in a picture, by latitude from the equator, and western longitude.
True confession time: I never know where a book is going. I get a gut feeling the story is there, then pursue it with the enthusiasm of a hunting tiger on a trail. If I knew where I was going, I’d get bored out of my mind and stop writing.
I first met the subject of X-ray diffraction of crystals in the pages of the book W. H. Bragg wrote for school children in 1925, ‘Concerning the Nature of Things.’
If a kid is reading a book about someone who looks like them but doesn’t talk like them, we stunt their growth by dissing them.
Until every soul is freely permitted to investigate every book and creed and dogma for itself, the world cannot be free.
Preachers in pulpits talked about what a great message is in the book. No matter what you do, somebody always imputes meaning into your books.
Mallarme said that everything in the world exists in order to end in a book. Today everything exists to end in a photograph.
If David Bowie wants, I’ll put him in my phone book.
‘StrengthsFinder 2.0’ is an effort to get the core message and language out to a much broader audience. We had no idea how well received the first strengths book would be by general readers – it was oriented more toward managers – or that the energy and excitement would continue to grow.
The book, you understand, was not written for publication. It was the portrayal of my emotions, the analysis of my own soul life during three months of my nineteenth year. I wrote then all the time, just as I do now, but, though the book is in diary form, it is not a diary.
I do, indeed, close my door at times and surrender myself to a book, but only because I can open the door again and see a human face looking at me.
I love putting on a candle, reading a book, and just taking a second for me.
The first book I remember loving was ‘Grug and the Big Red Apple.’ The first film I saw in the cinema was ‘Grease.’
Whenever I open a book about jazz, I turn to the index and look for Lennie Tristano, the incredible pianist; Lee Konitz, the luminous alto sax player; and Warne Marsh, the tenor player who captured some of the most beautiful sounds in the world.
You can look at my palm and see the storm coming. Read the book of my life and see I’ve overcome it.
Whenever I want to laugh, I read a wonderful book, ‘Children’s Letters to God.’ You can open it anywhere. One I read recently said, ‘Dear God, thank you for the baby brother, but what I prayed for was a puppy.’
I’m passionate and I travel the world not just as a tourist but to understand cultures… I’ve lived with Masai tribe… I travel the world and bring it back in the form of a research book that would become the starting point for the collection.
Deliver me from writers who say the way they live doesn’t matter. I’m not sure a bad person can write a good book, If art doesn’t make us better, then what on earth is it for.
Oprah’s got good politics, she’s got a good heart, and she’ll have us all up Jazzercising at six in the morning. This cannot be a bad thing, and reading a book while we’re Jazzercising. So America would be better off if Oprah were president.
The thing I love most about going to a book store is the self-help section is the biggest section because Americans know we’re screwed up. We know it. But we want to get better.
I buy a lot of books I never read. But that’s not really a waste, since all it takes is one idea from even one book to radically reshape the way a person leads, thinks and lives.
What you don’t know would make a great book.
I don’t go anywhere without a book by James Joyce called ‘Finnegan’s Wake.’
I love to read. My favorite book series is ‘Cherubs’.
I read pretty well in French and Spanish. I don’t want to read a book written in French or Spanish in translation.
It is very remarkable, that in the book of life, we find some almost of all kinds of occupations, who notwithstanding served God in their respective generations, and shone as so many lights in the world.
My mother gave me this book called Feature Films at Used Car Prices by a guy named Rick Schmidt. I gotta credit the guy, cuz he gave me the most practical advice. It empowers you.
I recommend anybody go to a bookstore, go down the self-help or new-age section, and just walk those aisles. See what book jumps out at you; there’s a good chance it’s a book you need in your life. That’s basically how I find the books that I read.
Reading a book is like re-writing it for yourself. You bring to a novel, anything you read, all your experience of the world. You bring your history and you read it in your own terms.
I lost my son in late 2011. He had been totally incapacitated from his neck down for the last eight years of his life, but his mind was alive and brilliant in those years. He even wrote a book, ‘Allegheny Mountain,’ lying at home in his hospital bed.
I wrote a book called The Taste of New Wine because I couldn’t find a book that talked about the reality of the situation and how we were dishonest and afraid.
The society in ‘The Handmaid’s Tale’ is a throwback to the early Puritans whom I studied extensively at Harvard under Perry Miller, to whom the book is dedicated.
When I write about Mickey Haller as the Lincoln lawyer, I totally see Matthew McConaughey because he took that character when that character was still fairly new to me – only two or three years old – when I knew McConaughey was going to play him. He’s also the same age, the right age, in comparison to the book.
The first four months of writing the book, my mental image is scratching with my hands through granite. My other image is pushing a train up the mountain, and it’s icy, and I’m in bare feet.
The problem with writing a book in verse is, to be successful, it has to sound like you knocked it off on a rainy Friday afternoon. It has to sound easy. When you can do it, it helps tremendously because it’s a thing that forces kids to read on. You have this unconsummated feeling if you stop.
‘Marley and Me’ was a book I was proud of and believed in, but I thought it would just have a modest audience because it is such a personal story about my marriage and my family.
I don’t want my kids to be on the streets period. I want my kids to be nerds. I want them to be book smart or playing sports – I don’t want them to know nothing about the streets.
We cannot tear out a single page of our life, but we can throw the whole book in the fire.
Any book that helps a child to form a habit of reading, to make reading one of his deep and continuing needs, is good for him.
You that would judge me, do not judge alone this book or that, come to this hallowed place where my friends’ portraits hang and look thereon; Ireland’s history in their lineaments trace; think where man’s glory most begins and ends and say my glory was I had such friends.
My favorite book is ‘Speed of Trust’ by Stephen Covey.
When Holly Madison, Hef’s former chief girlfriend, came out with a tell-all book about life in the Mansion, the most bizarre revelation was that, prior to the man’s infamous orgies, all of the live-in girlfriends were required to put on matching pink flannel pajamas.
I’m a huge Marvel Comics fan, and I’m a huge ‘Wolverine’ fan, I like the ‘X-Men’ comic book.
My mom would always read a book to me at night from when I was three. Now, I can’t go to sleep without reading a book. At the same time, once I read, it’s difficult for me to go to sleep, as I have an overactive imagination and I start thinking.
A book is good company. It is full of conversation without loquacity. It comes to your longing with full instruction, but pursues you never.
A picture book is a small door to the enormous world of the visual arts, and they’re often the first art a young person sees.
There’s so much more to a book than just the reading.
This is the sixth book I’ve written, which isn’t bad for a guy who’s only read two.
Today, if you want to access a typical out-of-print book, you have only one choice – fly to one of a handful of leading libraries in the country and hope to find it in the stacks.
Architecture is a very dangerous job. If a writer makes a bad book, eh, people don’t read it. But if you make bad architecture, you impose ugliness on a place for a hundred years.
There was a best-selling book in the late ’60s and ’70s called ‘The Adventurers’ by Harold Robbins. The lead character’s name was Dax. Anyone that’s roughly my age that’s named Dax is named from that book.
As long as your intentions are solid and about growth and progression and being productive and not being idle, then you’re doing good in my book.
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 write for no other purpose than to add to the beauty that now belongs to me. I write a book for no other reason than to add three or four hundred acres to my magnificent estate.
Sometimes the best reading comes just by accident. Someone talks about a book, or you’re just wandering the stacks in the library, and you find a book that you love.
When you are reading about a book, you focus on the main character, of course. When you have something in common with them and connect with them, you remember the lessons they learned, and then you can apply them to your life. So you can live the best life you can.
I didn’t know much. It wasn’t possible to buy a book about Nurmi, but I found out that in order to be faster over 10,000m, he ran 5,000m many times in training. And to be better at 5,000m, he ran 1,500m many times. And to be better at 1,500m, he ran four times 400m in training.
I’d like to know what I could do if I really had the time to spend on writing a book, with no columns or shows to do at the same time.
Anything created by human beings is already in the great book of nature.
The influence of ‘Hidden Fortress’ comes up a lot because it was printed in a book once. The truth is, the only thing I was inspired by was the fact that it’s told from the point of view of two peasants, who get mixed up with a samurai and princess and a lot of very high-level people.
A great book begins with an idea; a great life, with a determination.
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.
Honestly, I get character ideas from the most inane places. Sometimes a song will give me an idea. Sometimes I will just hear a snippet of conversation that ends up having nothing to do with the book that emerges.
The best time to plan a book is while you’re doing the dishes.
The book salesman should be honored because he brings to our attention, as a rule, the very books we need most and neglect most.
Reading is so private, and it is often a reader’s habit to finish a book, close the covers, and plunge into the next one without a backward glance.
It’s very inconvenient because every time I finish, let’s say, a chapter of a book, I think I’m going to ring Richard and then realize: Oh, Christ, I’ve buried him. I buried him last year.
Writing a book of poetry is like dropping a rose petal down the Grand Canyon and waiting for the echo.
Perfection is an unattainable goal. It isn’t going to be perfect. Just get words down on paper, and when you stumble to what you think is the end of the book, you will have hundreds of pages of words that came out of your head. It may not be perfect, but it looks like a book.
Over the years, people I’ve met have often asked me what I’m working on, and I’ve usually replied that the main thing was a book about Dresden.
Weird people follow you in the streets, you can’t sit alone in a restaurant or a cafe and read a book in peace, and I think everybody values those moments of being alone.
When I was living in Mexico and writing a book called ‘Aztec,’ I had to make a deliberate effort to ignore a lot of the ‘typically Mexican landscape’ around me – banana and citrus groves, roses and carnations, burros and toros – because they did not exist in Mexico in the 15th century, the time of my book.
Every book is a new journey. I never felt I was an expert on a subject as I embarked on a project.
I remember reading the book in high school and always thinking of Gatsby as this strong, stoic, suave, mysterious man who had everything under control. But when I read it as an adult, I realised he is a hollow man, a shell of a person trying to find meaning, who is not completely in touch with reality.
When I look back at my career as an author, I don’t look at the first book that was ever published as to where my career began – I look to the first book that I ever wrote.
Writing a screenplay is so spare, it kind of reminded me that I really should celebrate what I can do in a book, which is description: for example, places, people, locations.
I once joked in a book that there are three things you can’t do in life. You can’t beat the phone company, you can’t make a waiter see you until he is ready to see you, and you can’t go home again.
The basic challenge of any book is you know you’re going to be working on it for three or four years or more. So you want to have a subject that will keep you engaged.
The first novel I wrote was a monster – clocking in at 180,000 words – but it died a death, a death it deserved. It was called ‘The Gods First Make Mad.’ It was a good title, but it was the only good thing about the book. I didn’t let that put me off.
If there is a book that you want to read, but it hasn’t been written yet, you must be the one to write it.
My father always said, ‘Never trust anyone whose TV is bigger than their book shelf’ – so I make sure I read.
With screenplays and teleplays, they are mapped, really, in the blueprint of a finished product, which is something you’re going to watch on a screen. But a book is an end to itself, really.
If you imagine writing 1,000 words a day, which most journalists do, that would be a very long book a year. I don’t manage nearly that… but I have published slightly too much recently.
I’m always imposing my taste in books on others. I hope that people enjoy being surprised by a book they might not otherwise read – I enjoy the surprise myself when others do this to me.
I don’t go by the rule book… I lead from the heart, not the head.
I was a litigation lawyer. That’s all very logical. Become a litigation lawyer. Become successful. Have a nice office. But there was some pull inside of me saying, self-publish this book. I followed that intuition and it’s been a great choice for me in my life.
I read the Steve Jobs book, and that kind of changed everything. I’ve been, like, an Apple geek my whole life and have always seen him as a hero. But reading the book, and learning about how he built the company, and maintaining that corporate culture and all that, I think that influenced me a lot.
To me, the greatest invention of my lifetime is the laptop computer and the fact that I can be working on a book and be in an airport lounge, in a hotel room, and continue working; I fire up my laptop, and I’m in exactly the same place I was when I left home – that, to me, is a miracle.
When I am working on a book or a story, I write every morning as soon after first light as possible. There is no one to disturb you, and it is cool or cold, and you come to your work and warm as you write.
Wear the old coat and buy the new book.
I have a very short attention span, so sitting down with a book is very difficult for me.
One always tends to overpraise a long book, because one has got through it.
You go into the book store, there’s the cut-out of Dr. Phil, and then the dreaded women’s health section where every book, instead of the menopause book with the fanged Medusa head on the cover that might be more pertinent, you always see a flower and a poppy and a daisy and a stethoscope.
I bought the rights to this book, ‘The Ploughmen,’ by a Montana writer named Kim Zupan, and I’ve written the screenplay, and I really feel pretty strong about it. It’s really hauntingly beautiful. It’s got some suspense and great drama, but it’s a real character thing.
I want to do public speaking and cause campaigning. I want to write a book.
No two persons ever read the same book.
If one cannot enjoy reading a book over and over again, there is no use in reading it at all.
In ninth grade, I came up with a new form of rebellion. I hadn’t been getting good grades, but I decided to get all A’s without taking a book home. I didn’t go to math class, because I knew enough and had read ahead, and I placed within the top 10 people in the nation on an aptitude exam.
I work in a small study on the top floor of a brownstone in Brooklyn – it’s about 75 square feet, 11 taken up by book shelves along one wall.
There’s nothing better than curling up with a good book and sitting in front of the fire on winter evenings.
I’ve always had a foot in everything. As a kid, I was active in sports and theater. Now, I’m learning I have to focus a bit. I’m trying to get to next projects, like writing a screenplay. Once that comes together, I could put my mind to another book – maybe a fun kids’ book.
My sense of what a book should be has changed so radically. I like to think for the better.
I’m trying to create a collection of stories – the ‘U.F.O.W.A.V.E.’ songs are all stories. I haven’t really taken direct lyrical influence from other songwriters, but my dad bought me a book of W.H. Auden’s poems when I was younger, and the imagery really interested me.
How precious a book is in light of the offering, in the light of the one who has the privilege of this offering. The library tells you of this offering.
It’s very hard for me to write back to some of the fan mail, so one of the things I wanted to do was reach out through a book.
The reason a writer writes a book is to forget a book and the reason a reader reads one is to remember it.
Every book for me is a chapter in the long book which will finally be closed on the day of my death.
Paradise Lost is a book that, once put down, is very hard to pick up again.
Unlike many travel books I didn’t set out to travel with the idea of writing a book in mind.
The first sentence of a book is a handshake, perhaps an embrace.
I’m fond of science fiction. But not all science fiction. I like science fiction where there’s a scientific lesson, for example – when the science fiction book changes one thing but leaves the rest of science intact and explores the consequences of that. That’s actually very valuable.
My life is an open book. You’re welcome to speculate.
I’ve mis-signed many a book Rollins or Clemens. My readers quickly become aware. Booksellers will often promote me under both names, and I do plug both at signings. Generally, the fantasy reader has no problem going into the suspense genre. It’s harder for the typical suspense reader to go the other direction.
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 placed my new novel, ‘The Book of Lost Fragrances’, in Paris, knowing it would be a challenge. But the book belonged in the city that is one of the greatest perfume capitals of the world and has been since for more than three centuries.
You can’t die with an unfinished book.
People would tell me, especially after my marriage to Prince, ‘You need to write a book because you’ve had a crazy life.’
There are several occupational hazards for book reviewers, chief among them being the Curse of the Jaded Palate – that sinking feeling when you start reading a new book and begin to suspect that you’ve seen it all before.
I’ve always been really hard on myself. If I didn’t book a job, I would cry.
The most technologically efficient machine that man has ever invented is the book.
I know what kind of books I read on vacation, and it is not necessarily ‘Diplomacy’ by Henry Kissinger. No disrespect to that book; I have read that book. But not on spring break.
Don’t worry about writing a book or getting famous or making money. Just lead an interesting life.
The way a book is read, which is to say, the qualities a reader brings to a book can have as much to do with its worth as anything the author puts into it.
I enjoy very much being in a foreign country, in a new country, new place. And I enjoy also beginning a new book. It’s like being someone else.
In true education, anything that comes to our hand is as good as a book: the prank of a page- boy, the blunder of a servant, a bit of table talk – they are all part of the curriculum.
The world is a book, and those who do not travel read only a page.
When I was 12, I wanted to learn how to play the guitar, and I found a chord book in a shop, and I stuffed it down my trousers. And that’s how I learned to play the guitar.
You know you have a gambling problem when it’s 4 A.M. at the Mirage Sports Book and you’re walking around going, ‘Hey you get the lacrosse scores?’
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.
‘Harry Potter’ created a generation of readers in an era when kids could have disappeared into the depths of the Internet. That’s no small feat. Every book series owes J.K. Rowling a debt of gratitude.
I grew up on Harvard Square and I watched 50-year old men walking around with green book bags slung over their shoulders going for their fourth PhD, never having left the world of academia to alleged reality.
I am sure of this: that no one can write a book which children will like unless he write it for himself first.
My mother says I was two-and-a-half when I started playing. My father was a minister, and when he went to church in the morning, she would put on Fats Waller, Billie Holiday, Nat King Cole and Cole Porter records. I’d crawl up on the piano stool, sit on a phone book and play.
If I can be somewhere with sunshine and have bare feet and a book, I’m happy.
Each has his past shut in him like the leaves of a book known to him by his heart, and his friends can only read the title.
I usually write about ordinary people and ordinary things, but Paul Farmer is the least ordinary person I’ve ever met… He’s the leader of a small group of people who hope to cure a sick world, and I hope my book can help in some small way.
I first got to know Charles in the late seventies when I wrote an article and then a book about him and I think at the time he came across as quite appealing, it was probably the height of his popularity.
I love real books, paper books, but I also love buying online, and I think that people are more willing to take a chance to read something if it’s cheaper – sometimes books on the Kindle are $6. A hardback book is $25. For $25, it better be a really great book. Or you’re going to be mad.
‘Classic.’ A book which people praise and don’t read.
Film music should have the same relationship to the film drama that somebody’s piano playing in my living room has on the book I am reading.
Writing a book about yourself is like therapy, and you go ‘Oh My God, that’s the reason that happened.’ Writing about it, you’re forced to really examine things.
I think as a young person, leaving high school or college, you’re like, ‘All right, all right, enough already.’ But now there’s a part of me that would like to go back and relish those moments when you could sit down and just… read a book.
