We’ve sourced some of the most interesting and thought-provoking Book Quotes from Marianne Vos, Keith Miller, Alan Rickman, Dimple Kapadia, Franz Kafka. Each of the following quotes is overflowing with creativity, and knowledge.
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.
Then one day I read about a book that said that the church is the only army that shoots its wounded.
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.
I read a book on candles and got curious. I followed it up by taking a course with famous London-based candle maker David Constable. And now these have become the passion of my life.
A book must be the ax for the frozen sea within us.
I love writing two narratives! I think concurrent storylines are my favorite way to write a book.
‘The Luminaries’ is such a different book to ‘The Rehearsal.’ There are only a couple of things that link the two books: there’s a certain preoccupation with looking at relationships from the outside, being shut out of human intimacy; and then there’s patterning.
An autobiography is a book a person writes about his own life and it is usually full of all sorts of boring details.
I read one chapter of a book and put it down. Thank God for Kindle.
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.
A broad margin of leisure is as beautiful in a man’s life as in a book. Haste makes waste, no less in life than in housekeeping. Keep the time, observe the hours of the universe, not of the cars.
I’m pretty much an open book.
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.
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.
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?
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.’
Politics is not a bad profession. If you succeed there are many rewards, if you disgrace yourself you can always write a book.
Getting out of the hospital is a lot like resigning from a book club. You’re not out of it until the computer says you’re out of it.
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.’
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.
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.
Great nations write their autobiographies in three manuscripts – the book of their deeds, the book of their words and the book of their art.
No matter where I’m going, I always have sunglasses, a book, and some gum in my carry-on.
Few things in life seem more sexy than a banned book.
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.
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.
A wild and crazy weekend involves sitting on the front porch, smoking a cigar, reading a book.
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.
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!
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.
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.
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.
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.
You are only as good as your last book, and so there has to be a book.
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.
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.
You don’t write a book to show off.
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 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.
The gender is irrelevant; the identity is the one you should try and create for yourself by yourself, and the narrative of your own life becomes your own book.
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 Social Register is a nice address book for some people, but that’s about it.
I’ve come to think of Europe as a hardcover book, America as the paperback version.
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.
I’m no longer religious, but the Bible fascinates me. Hardly anyone reads it anymore, but it’s got everything: it’s a book of poetry, it’s a book of principle, it’s a book of stories, and of myths and of epic tales, a book of histories and a book of fictions, of riddles, fables, parables and allegories.
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.
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.
Wearing a giant, over-sized scarf will make you look deeply intelligent in almost any situation, but especially a book club.
You know, I’m pretty much an open book.
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.’
What I’ve learned, traveling the country and doing book signings, Mama’s biscuits – you know, somebody in Montana’s got their version of Mama’s biscuits, somebody in California’s got their version – so it made me realize that we’re not as regionalized as we think we are.
‘Allegiance’ is pretty much a book musical. You know, people talk and then they burst out into song.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Coy Wire played in the NFL for 9 years and is now a motivational speaker and has a book out called ‘Change Your Mind.’ He is an amazing person with such positive energy! When Kroy and I first met and started dating, there weren’t a whole lot of people that supported us, but Coy always did.
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.
‘The Chicken Soup for the Soul’ books are the result of over 20 years of teaching seminars and giving speeches. The first book contains all of the stories that I used in my seminars to illustrate the points that I wanted to make.
I’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.
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.
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.’
I love putting on a candle, reading a book, and just taking a second for me.
A classic is a book that has never finished saying what it has to say.
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.
The profession of book writing makes horse racing seem like a solid, stable business.
I just want to stay in my hotel room, read my book. I enjoy that private time.
Many European countries, as well as Australia, Canada, Israel, and New Zealand, have adopted legislation that creates a ‘public lending right’, where the government recognises that enabling hundreds of people to read a single copy of a book provides a public good, but that doing so is likely to reduce sales of the book.
The first sentence of a book is a handshake, perhaps an embrace.
What you don’t know would make a great book.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Quite often in comic book movies, very good actresses are relegated to being the girlfriend or the helper or the sidekick or something.
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’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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Erudition – dust shaken out of a book into an empty skull.
The most important thing about Spaceship Earth – an instruction book didn’t come with it.
The worth of a book is to be measured by what you can carry away from it.
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.
Life is like a book: one has to know when to turn the page.
Unprovided with original learning, unformed in the habits of thinking, unskilled in the arts of composition, I resolved to write a book.
I’ve always thought that a good book should be either the entry point inward, to learn about yourself, or a door outward, to open you up to new worlds.
Every reader finds himself. The writer’s work is merely a kind of optical instrument that makes it possible for the reader to discern what, without this book, he would perhaps never have seen in himself.
Once, in London, the BBC asked me what was my favorite English book. I said Alice in Wonderland.
The frontiers of a book are never clear-cut: beyond the title, the first lines, and the last full stop, beyond its internal configuration and its autonomous form, it is caught up in a system of references to other books, other texts, other sentences: it is a node within a network.
I 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
I live my life like an open book, even though it’s open on the wrong page.
You can’t die with an unfinished book.
I see the world as voices, as colors, as it were. From book to book, I change, the subjects change, but the narrative thread remains the same.
At Somerset I played with Marcus Trescothick who has spoken very openly about his battle with depression and anxiety. I had a few conversations with him about his problems but I also read his book which provided me with a great insight into what he went though.
It’s no coincidence that the word ‘holiday’ suggests a holy day, or that the longest book in the Torah concerns the Sabbath. If you wish to advance in any sphere, the best way is to take a retreat.
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.
I’m aware that many of my friends will be saddened and shocked, or shock-saddened, over some of the chapters in ‘The Catcher in the Rye.’ Some of my best friends are children. In fact, all my best friends are children. It’s almost unbearable for me to realize that my book will be kept on a shelf, out of their reach.
People like that I wrote a book – that’s cute, but oh, making a business out of it? That’s not nice.
I told my whole life story in my book.
My sense of what a book should be has changed so radically. I like to think for the better.
He that composes himself is wiser than he that composes a book.
I taught myself to read when I was three by comparing the letters in my Mother Goose book with the rhymes I had memorised.
My father always said, ‘Never trust anyone whose TV is bigger than their book shelf’ – so I make sure I read.
The writer probably knows what he meant when he wrote a book, but he should immediately forget what he meant when he’s written it.
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.
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.
All modern American literature comes from one book by Mark Twain called Huckleberry Finn.
Unlike many travel books I didn’t set out to travel with the idea of writing a book in mind.
I think that I have every right to write a book. I think I’m interesting. I have perspective about me.
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.
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.
A person who publishes a book willfully appears before the populace with his pants down. If it is a good book nothing can hurt him. If it is a bad book nothing can help him.
It’s one thing looking up your own book in a library, but imagine being able to look up your own word in the dictionary.
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.
If you’re a public official, your life is an open book.
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.
Nature is a divine art; it cannot be the artist. It is a dominical book and cannot be the scribe. It is an embroidery and cannot be the embroiderer. It is a register and cannot be the accountant. It is the law and cannot be the power.
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?
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.
Before ‘Giant,’ I had only ever worked with Michael Greif, Michael John LaChiusa and Kate Baldwin in readings. It’s really exciting to be blessed with the opportunity to work with so many I would put in the ‘genius’ book.
My life has been an open book, for better or for worse.
You can never step into the same book twice, because you are different each time you read it.
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.
This is the sixth book I’ve written, which isn’t bad for a guy who’s only read two.
If I truly believe everything that’s in that book, God is in control. He is in control. He’s working for my good. Doesn’t mean everything’s going to be smooth, but that’s all I needed to know. There is a light at the end of the tunnel.
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?
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.
I started out writing poems before I figured to put melodies to them and play the guitar. Somewhere, there’s a book out there on all those early songs and poems. I hope no one ever finds it. I don’t think it’s my finest work.
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.
I was reading a book… ‘the history of glue’ – I couldn’t put it down.
There’s so much more to a book than just the reading.
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.
I do not recall a Jewish home without a book on the table.
Everywhere I have sought rest and not found it, except sitting in a corner by myself with a little book.
Don’t give me books for Christmas; I already have a book.
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.
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.
I can’t not put humor in a book.
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?
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.
No two persons ever read the same book.
Finishing a book is just like you took a child out in the back yard and shot it.
Wear the old coat and buy the new book.
Once I found this possibility to use Twitter and Facebook and my blog to connect to my readers, I’m going to use it, to connect to them and to share thoughts that I cannot use in the book.
I could have been a cult writer if I’d kept writing surrealistic novels. But I wanted to break into the mainstream, so I had to prove that I could write a realistic book.
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 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.
A book is a book is a book.
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 have become infected, now that I see how beautifully a book is coming out of all this.
Read. Read. Read. Just don’t read one type of book. Read different books by various authors so that you develop different styles.
A book is the only immortality.
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.
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.
For years I’ve wanted to write a book about mummies, and had been following the science of mummy CT scans when the premise for ‘The Keepsake’ occurred to me: what if an ‘ancient’ mummy turns out to have a bullet in its leg? How does a modern murder victim get turned into a mummy?
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.
There is no friend as loyal as a book.
‘The Lorax’ book was intended to be propaganda.
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.
My attitude is that if anybody of any age wants to read a book, let them, but I do think that no child would want to read ‘Boneland.’
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.
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 man will turn over half a library to make one book.
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.
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.
You have to write the book that wants to be written. And if the book will be too difficult for grown-ups, then you write it for children.
The joke in our family is that we can cry reading the phone book.
It is my ambition to say in ten sentences what others say in a whole book.
The English Bible – a book which, if everything else in our language should perish, would alone suffice to show the whole extent of its beauty and power.
How could I make a little book, when I have seen enough to make a dozen large books?
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.
The book of female logic is blotted all over with tears, and Justice in their courts is forever in a passion.
Life isn’t like a book. Life isn’t logical or sensible or orderly. Life is a mess most of the time. And theology must be lived in the midst of that mess.
Someone told me that each equation I included in the book would halve the sales.
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 write about myself with the same pencil and in the same exercise book as about him. It is no longer I, but another whose life is just beginning.
I think Stevie Wonder could sing the phone book and manage to make me cry.
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’ve always been really hard on myself. If I didn’t book a job, I would cry.
Someday I hope to write a book where the royalties will pay for the copies I give away.
‘The Sun Also Rises’ by Ernest Hemingway is my favorite book. You feel manly reading it.
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.
To me, at forty-four years old, my book was a search for truth and identity.
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.
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’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.
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.
Every burned book enlightens the world.
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.
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.
William Dalrymple called me a war junkie in his silly book. No, I don’t have a desire for it. I’m appalled and infuriated by it.
There is no such thing as a moral or an immoral book. Books are well written, or badly written.
All that I am I owe to Jesus Christ, revealed to me in His divine Book.
Never open a book with weather. There are exceptions. If you happen to be Barry Lopez, who has more ways to describe ice and snow than an Eskimo, you can do all the weather reporting you want.
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’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?’
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.
There is no Frigate like a book to take us lands away nor any coursers like a page of prancing Poetry.
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 have a very short attention span, so sitting down with a book is very difficult for me.
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.
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.
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 suspect there are two kinds of novelists. Those who have a point of view and have something to say and then write a novel in order to say that thing, and those of us who write the book in order to find out what we think about that thing.
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.
The chief reason for going to school is to get the impression fixed for life that there is a book side for everything.
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.
Whenever one reads of the determination of the species, or opens a book on natural science and history, in whatever language, one inevitably comes across the name of Linne.
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.
I love the book ‘Devil in the White City.’
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’.
The good, the admirable reader identifies himself not with the boy or the girl in the book, but with the mind that conceived and composed that book.
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.
I am writing a book called ‘The History of Australia in Hundred Objects.’ It’s of things we have invented in Australia. And you know, some of them are amazing. We invented the clapper boards used in films. We invented those cranes – those big long cranes used on construction sites.
In camp was found a book, the first of the kind I had ever seen, in which I was made a great hero, slaying Indians by the hundreds.
Anyone who was tempted to draw comparisons between my father’s ‘Dave Robicheaux’ series and my first book quickly gave up.
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.
I doubt I’ll ever do another book collaboration; I’ve been spoiled. Roger and I both happened to move to New Mexico at about the same time, when we each had a family of young kids to raise. Socializing seemed to lead naturally to working together.
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.
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.
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?
‘The Disaster Artist’ book is the peak of my career in many ways, but there’s something so rewarding about creating something from scratch.
Metal guys are huge nerds. A good percentage of them are either horror or sci-fi or comic book or fantasy nerds.
I love graphic design. I love working with design, and I love storytelling, so I’ve been working on a children’s book for a while, and I’d like to see that through.
I went to public school my whole life, graduated high school with my class. Growing up, I’d go to an audition, my friends would go to soccer practice and we’d all reconvene and hang out in our neighborhood. When I would book something, I would never tell my friends. Acting was just fun. I was a kid, I wasn’t jaded.
Honesty is the first chapter in the book of wisdom.
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.
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.
‘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.
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.
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.
I just feel that ‘The Color Purple,’ which was my 10th book, was a true gift from my ancestors.
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.
Whether you’re going to a museum or a flea market or flipping through a book, always be on the lookout for something special.
‘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.
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.
‘Until Friday Night’ is the first book in my new young adult series, ‘The Field Party.’
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.
I wish there were a hundred services with which I could easily look at such a book; it would have saved me a lot of time, and it would have spared Google a tremendous amount of effort.
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.
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.
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 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?
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.
What he’s done is recognise the cinematic nature of the book. It’s beautifully realised – it’s a beat film.
The paperback is very interesting but I find it will never replace the hardcover book – it makes a very poor doorstop.
I don’t go anywhere without a book by James Joyce called ‘Finnegan’s Wake.’
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.
The reason a writer writes a book is to forget a book and the reason a reader reads one is to remember it.
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 sell a book. I sell myself. And the way to sell yourself is to be an instrument of love.
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.
If I read a book and it makes my whole body so cold no fire can ever warm me, I know that is poetry.
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.
A book that is shut is but a block.
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.
‘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.
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.
Eitan Hersh wrote a book in 2015 called ‘Hacking the Electorate.’ It’s pretty much the best book I’ve seen on the use of data science in U.S. elections and what good evidence shows works and does not work.
I want to do public speaking and cause campaigning. I want to write a book.
You wouldn’t try and make a cake without a recipe book. Careers are just the same.
Nature is a book, a letter, a fairy tale (in the philosophical sense) or whatever you want to call it.
Write a book you’d like to read. If you wouldn’t read it, why would anybody else? Don’t write for a perceived audience or market. It may well have vanished by the time your book’s ready.
I’m always reading the next book. Taking notes. Highlighting, researching, studying. It doesn’t stop.
I don’t have a process; I just feel it. My book on acting would be very short.
The ‘Broken Destiny’ series will be a trilogy, with each book releasing about a year apart.
Being on ‘Idol,’ you have no choice but to be an open book.
The music I listen, the book I read, and the people I meet; these are some things that keeps me going.
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.
My favorite book is anything by Kurt Vonnegut – he’s my literary hero. I got to meet him several times, which was a great thrill for me. I don’t really remember what we talked about.
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.
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.
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 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.
Everyone thinks they’re going to write one book of poems or one novel.
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.
With a book I am the writer and I am also the director and I’m all of the actors and I’m the special effects guy and the lighting technician: I’m all of that. So if it’s good or bad, it’s all up to me.
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.
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.
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.
It’s a very good historical book about history.
I’m writing a book. I’ve got the page numbers done.
I’m an open book.
Over the holidays, and even during filming, I realized that I actually like my body, even if it’s not perfect according to the book. I just feel sexy. For the first time, I don’t want to get rid of the curves. I just want to tone it up. My body is comfortable, and it’s not unhealthy, so I’m going to rock with it.
I wrote in the book very specifically what I wanted to write about, period, and left it at.
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.
Kids are not going to sit and read a slow-paced book. Neither are adults.
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.
It’s insulting to believe that teens should have a different kind of book than an adult should.
My favorite book was ‘The Giving Tree.’
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.
I even smoke in bed. Imagine smoking a cigar in bed, reading a book. Next to your bed, there’s a cigar table with a special cigar ashtray, and your wife is reading a book on how to save the environment.
Each new book that comes out kind of pulls up the old ones a little bit. The new releases are always going to bolster the old releases.
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!
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.
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.
If you’re going to abridge a book in the author’s own words, you can’t go sticking your own in.
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.
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.
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.
With stand-up, I can have an idea, go down the street to a comedy club and work on it, flesh it out, book a venue, people will come, then film it. I do all that myself; I never have to answer to anybody.
I have a vision of homes alerted, of classes alive, and of pulpits aflame with the spirit of Book of Mormon messages.
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.
If a man writes a book, let him set down only what he knows. I have guesses enough of my own.
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.
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.
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.
You’re never too old, too wacky, too wild, to pick up a book and read to a child.
I’m not a very glamorous person. I like to just sit alone in a room and read a book or meditate.
Publishing is a very mysterious business. It is hard to predict what kind of sale or reception a book will have, and advertising seems to do very little good.
The best book on programming for the layman is ‘Alice in Wonderland’; but that’s because it’s the best book on anything for the layman.
Paradise Lost is a book that, once put down, is very hard to pick up again.
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.
‘Dare to Discipline’ was published in 1970 in the midst of the Vietnam War and a culture of rebellion. The book was written in that context, but the principles of child rearing have not changed.
I’m hot on the Jewish book club circuit. How many black authors do you know who can say that?
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.
When you read a great book, you don’t escape from life, you plunge deeper into it.
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.
For many, the recent disclosure of massive warrantless surveillance programs of all citizens by the Obama administration has brought back memories of George Orwell’s ‘1984.’ Another Orwell book seems more apt as the White House and its allies try to contain the scandal: ‘Animal Farm.’
I read pretty well in French and Spanish. I don’t want to read a book written in French or Spanish in translation.
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.
I was a war correspondent in Korea. I did a book on it: ‘This is War.’
We often hear of a male director directing a great indie and immediately being offered the next huge comic book movie. Rarely, if ever, does this happen to a woman.
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.
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.
Here’s my definition of a great beach read – a fabulous story that sucks me in like a black hole and when it’s over, it jettisons my bones across the galaxy with a hair on fire mission to convince everyone I know that they must read that book or they will die.
Dreams are illustrations from the book your soul is writing about you.
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.
To me, cinema is cinema. Cinema is one big tree with many branches. The same as literature. In literature, you don’t just say, ‘Oh, I bought some literature.’ No, you say, ‘I bought a novel’ by so-and-so, or a book of essays by so-and-so.
Jews have a special relationship to books, and the Haggadah has been translated more widely, and reprinted more often, than any other Jewish book. It is not a work of history or philosophy, not a prayer book, user’s manual, timeline, poem or palimpsest – and yet it is all these things.
One should live between extravagance and meanness. Don’t save money by starving your mind. It is false economy never to take a holiday, or never to spend money for an evening’s amusement or for a useful book.
The book salesman should be honored because he brings to our attention, as a rule, the very books we need most and neglect most.
What a book a devil’s chaplain might write on the clumsy, wasteful, blundering, low, and horribly cruel work of nature!
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.
As a 14-year-old with anxiety, to have read about that in a book would have helped me so much.
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.
Every time I read a book, I find something new.
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.
I’m the world’s worst at reading reviews and then pretending I’ve read the 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.
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 read ‘Game Change.’ If you want to relive the campaign, that book is unbelievable. It’s great. It’s the book of that campaign. It brought all the memories back of everything with Clinton and Obama, and Sarah Palin and McCain, and choosing her, and John Edwards. It was an interesting book.
Having been unpopular in high school is not just cause for book publications.
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.
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.
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’m a huge Marvel Comics fan, and I’m a huge ‘Wolverine’ fan, I like the ‘X-Men’ comic book.
Let us remember: One book, one pen, one child, and one teacher can change the world.
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.
Confidence is a huge turn-on, but I like a man who’s also kind and gentle. It’s sexy when a guy listens and can have a conversation or read a book – something different than just going out to the club.
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.
Early on my career, I figured out that I just have to write the book I have to write at that moment. Whatever else is going on in the culture is just not that important. If you could get the culture to write your book, that would be great. But the culture can’t write your book.
To me a book is a message from the gods to mankind; or, if not, should never be published at all.
Every book is a children’s book if the kid can read!
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.
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.
Every book for me is a chapter in the long book which will finally be closed on the day of my death.
When I was about eight, I realised the person whose name was on the book got money for it, and it seemed almost too good to be true that you could get paid for making things up.
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.
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.
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 smart, you’ll always be humble. You can learn all you want, but there’ll always be somebody who’s never read a book who’ll know twice what you know.
I thought my book was done, then we went to Hawaii and the whole last chapter happened.
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.
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.
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.
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.
I’m interested in so many different things and I’d like to cover a lot of territory. I’m trying to see my show as the Sunday ‘Times.’ You have the Arts & Leisure section, you have the Op-Ed page, you have the Book Review… even the Style section has those wonderful essays about relationships.
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’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.
My career is an open book, but my life is not.
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.
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.
I can’t bear art that you can walk round and admire. A book should be either a bandit or a rebel or a man in the crowd.
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.
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.
There’s no better book with which to defend the Bible than the Bible itself.
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.
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.
My advice is this. For Christ’s sake, don’t write a book that is suitable for a kid of 12 years old, because the kids who read who are 12 years old are reading books for adults. I read all of the James Bond books when I was about 11, which was approximately the right time to read James Bond books.
I’m in the middle of my sixth book, which is about animals at the Los Angeles Zoo.
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.
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.
‘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.
Each new book is a tremendous challenge.
I love the idea of the teachings of Jesus Christ and the beautiful stories about it, which I loved in Sunday school and I collected all the little stickers and put them in my book. But the reality is that organised religion doesn’t seem to work. It turns people into hateful lemmings and it’s not really compassionate.
In this one book are the two most interesting personalities in the whole world – God and yourself. The Bible is the story of God and man, a love story in which you and I must write our own ending, our unfinished autobiography of the creature and the Creator.
I teach for the Book Trust, which promotes reading and writing with children.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
‘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.
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.
‘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.
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 don’t tweet, Twitter, email, Facebook, look book, no kind of book. I have a land line phone at my home – that’s the only phone I have. If my phone rang every day like everyone else around me, I would lose my mind.
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.
I thought it must be pure science fiction. But when I checked it out I found a lot of magazine articles that actually supported the theory behind the book which was incredible. That’s when I decided to acquire the rights of the book and everything went from there.
Beware of the person of one book.
When one man dies, one chapter is not torn out of the book, but translated into a better language.
Particularly when you’re making a movie of a book, people are always waiting with their knives – you know?
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.
A well-composed book is a magic carpet on which we are wafted to a world that we cannot enter in any other way.
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.
If I pick up a book with vampires on the cover, I want there to be vampires. If I pick up a book with spaceships on the cover, I want spaceships. If I see one with dragons, I want there to be dragons inside the book. Proper labeling. Ethical labeling.
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.
Every book is a quotation; and every house is a quotation out of all forests, and mines, and stone quarries; and every man is a quotation from all his ancestors.
If I ever wrote a book on preaching, it would contain three words: Preach the Word. Get rid of all the other stuff that gets you sidetracked; preach the Word.
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.
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.
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.
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.
I loathe computers more and more, so I have one I can shut down and shelve like a book.
In my family, education was something you endured. My parents weren’t educated past high school, and the only book in our house was a ‘Reader’s Digest’ condensed book. Can you imagine?
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.
He who loveth a book will never want a faithful friend, a wholesome counsellor, a cheerful companion, or an effectual comforter.
The first book I remember loving was ‘Grug and the Big Red Apple.’ The first film I saw in the cinema was ‘Grease.’
I gave myself two months to book a job. One month later I was cast on ‘Modern Family.’
When I was 7 years old, I announced that I was going to write a book about pollution. I didn’t get around to it until I was 29, but I always recognized that pollution was a theft. That it was a way of stealing something from the public – the common earth.
I’m not writing to encourage people to read my book or even books in general. That’s not my job. My job is to write them. And if people want to read them, that’s great.
With ‘Wonder Woman,’ I did one story with Alex Ross, and I had a lot of fun doing it, but I don’t think I could do a ‘Wonder Woman’ book on a regular basis, because there’s so much history there and so much mythology and everything.
I love old books. They tell you stories about their use. You can see where the fingerprints touched the pages as they held the book open. You can see how long they lingered on each page by the finger stains.
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 realised I’d never climb Everest but thought I could still write a book.
Miss a meal if you have to, but don’t miss a book.
Ideally a book would have no order to it, and the reader would have to discover his own.
I spent three days a week for 10 years educating myself in the public library, and it’s better than college. People should educate themselves – you can get a complete education for no money. At the end of 10 years, I had read every book in the library and I’d written a thousand stories.
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 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.
Your life isn’t about doing one perfect ‘thing’ and then falling down dead. It’s more like going to church or writing a book. You do it over and over, always trying to be a little bit better. Then you die.
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.
We don’t have to think up a title till we get the doggone book written.
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.
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.
The book is openly a kind of spiritual autobiography, but the trick is that on any other level it’s a kind of insane collage of fragments of memory.
The dirtiest book of all is the expurgated book.
Hungry man, reach for the book: it is a weapon.
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.
A historical romance is the only kind of book where chastity really counts.
Boxing is the only sport you can get your brain shook, your money took and your name in the undertaker book.
Mallarme said that everything in the world exists in order to end in a book. Today everything exists to end in a photograph.
I used to sketch – that’s the way I thought out loud. Then they made a book of my sketches, and I got self-conscious, so now I don’t do it much.
I think of life as a good book. The further you get into it, the more it begins to make sense.
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.
The book you don’t read won’t help.
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.
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.
Characters are the key to a good book. It took me several novels to comprehend that.
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.
I don’t go by the rule book… I lead from the heart, not the head.
A book is good company. It is full of conversation without loquacity. It comes to your longing with full instruction, but pursues you never.
