Book Culture Quotes

#1. Students are very gullible about the web. The only way you can really sort out information on the web is if you've had a prior training in book culture.

Camille Paglia

#2. Ours is a culture that dances on the edge of ephemerality. If our servers slept for too long or if we left our iPads unplugged for too long, we'd wake up like Rip Van Winkle to find all of our book culture erased.

Jason Merkoski

#3. I'm not really all that familiar with comic book culture.

Christoph Waltz

#4. I think most Native American literature is unreadable by the vast majority of Native Americans. Generally speaking Indians don't read books. It's not a book culture. That's why I'm trying to make movies. Indians go to movies; Indians own video recorders.

Sherman Alexie

#5. I always thought that television was the way to go in my goal to invade pop culture because it got to towns in which there were no bookstores. That's how I used to think of it: How do I reach kids who not only don't read but probably have no access to much in the way of books?

Matt Groening

#6. Imagine books and music and movies being filtered and homogenized. Certified. Approved for consumption. People will be happy to give up most of their culture for the assurance that the tiny bit that comes through is safe and clean. White noise.

Chuck Palahniuk

#7. The sure foundations of the state are laid in knowledge, not in ignorance; and every sneer at education, at culture, at book learning, which is the recorded wisdom of the experience of mankind, is the demagogue's sneer at intelligent liberty, inviting national degeneracy and ruin.

George William Curtis

#8. Not just a recipe book, but a genuine overview of Tuscany's culinary history and culture, a journey in images through photographs taken specifically by expert photographers.

Tuscookany

#9. After the pleasure of possessing books there is hardly anything more pleasant than that of speaking of them, and of communicating to the public the innocent richness of thought which we have acquired by the culture of letters.

Charles Nodier

#10. Contribute to charitable projects like the printing of spiritual books so that they can be sold at a lower price. Poor people will then be able to buy and read them. In this way we can help to cultivate spiritual culture in them also.

Mata Amritanandamayi

#11. Basically the message is: Steal It! Art, music, culture, the odd book and the slab of cheese ... the new will be built upon the ruins of the old.

Buenaventura Durruti

#12. Healing must always seek to give voice to suffering, and the greater the range of words and meanings we have at our disposal, the clearer the voice becomes.
Iona Heath in BMJ 2000;320:125 ( 8 January) Review of the book Illness and Culture in the Postmodern Age by David Morris

Iona Heath

#13. I started with the book 'Boardwalk Empire' and then immersed myself in the history of Atlantic City, World War I, the temperance movement, Prohibition, pop culture. I even read the news and magazines of the period just to soak in it. That was before I even started thinking of the story.

Terence Winter

#14. Well, we look for sources of inspiration in pop culture in general. It's very important for us that, when it comes to storytelling, we don't look into other video games. We'd rather look into other mediums
movies, television series and books
for sources of inspiration.

Sam Lake

#15. Looking for a good book to read and a great teacher to listen to? Here is a good book and here is a great teacher: Other cultures! To read this book and to listen to this teacher, all you need is to travel!

Mehmet Murat Ildan

#16. If literature truly possesses a mysterious power, I think perhaps it is precisely this: that one can read a book by a writer of a different time, a different country, a different race, a different language, and a different culture and there encounter a sensation that is one's very own.

Yu Hua

#17. Nothing is more dead and dated than the book which once caused controversy.

Alec Waugh

#18. The mommy-porn genre currently sweeping the book industry and the Babylonian excess of most television shows probably fall within the historical norm in our culture's sleaze index and are not omens of the imminent collapse of civilization, though if I were not so busy, I might start building an ark.

Dean Koontz

#19. I have comic-book loving, pop-culture-obsessed parents. The coolest. I'm sure the two Meadows girls and the seven Cobalt children would protest and say their parents are cool, but there's no comparison.
Hands down, mine are the goddamn best.

Krista Ritchie

#20. Do not, under any circumstances, put this book down and turn on the teevee.
The teevee debilitates our culture.

Inga Muscio

#21. Reading is one of the true pleasures of life. In our age of mass culture, when so much that we encounter is abridged,adapted, adulterated, shredded, and boiled down, it is mind-easing and mind-inspiring to sit down privately with a congenial book ...

Thomas S. Monson

#22. Culture is everything. Culture is the way we dress, the way we carry our heads, the way we walk, the way we tie our ties - it is not only the fact of writing books or building houses.

Aime Cesaire

#23. I don't like this culture of reading a book and spitting out an immediate reaction.

Caroline Kepnes

#24. To excavate is to open a book written in the language that the centuries have spoken into the earth.

Spyridon Marinatos

#25. Morality, then, is not a set of arbitrary regulations dictated by a vengeful deity and written down in a book; nor is it the custom of a particular culture or tribe. It is a consequence of the interchangeability of perspectives and the opportunity the world provides for positive-sum games.

Steven Pinker

#26. If you have ever fucked up in your life, or if the great river of sadness that runs through us all has touched you, then this book is for you. So thank you for the collective energy it takes to write in the face of culture. I can feel you.

Lidia Yuknavitch

#27. Ricardo Semler wrote a most interesting book about an including business culture (1995). He describes a Brazilian company that manufactured customized pumps.

Charles J. Pellerin

#28. If you write chick lit, and if you're a New Yorker, and if your book becomes the topic of pop-culture fascination, the paper might make dismissive and ignorant mention of your book. If you write romance, forget about it. You'll be lucky if they spell your name right on the bestseller list.

Jennifer Weiner

#29. 'The Practical Heart' was published one week before the World Trade towers collapsed. Book reviewing and all else in our culture stopped dead-still for half a year. I went on the book tour anyway. But I felt like the apostle Paul going unto the catacombs where scared believers hid and prayed.

Allan Gurganus

#30. The nurturing flow of life, extreme intelligence, beauty, and perfect harmony are active in every one of us. Yoga was developed in ancient wisdom culture to gently reveal what we already have. Read this book.

Mark Whitwell

#31. The best books are not read even by those who are called good readers. What does our Concord culture amount to? There is in this town, with a very few exceptions, no taste for the best or for very good books even in English literature, whose words all can read and spell.

Henry David Thoreau

#32. Every book purchase made from Amazon is a vote for a culture without content and without contentment.

Ursula K. Le Guin

#33. ...because there's a secret order. The books, you can't place them random. The other day I put Cervantes next to Tolstoj.
And I thought, if close to Anna Karenina we have Don Quixote, sure the latter will do his best to save her.

Ettore Scola

#34. Susan Bordo's Unbearable Weight is a masterpiece of complex an nuanced thinking not only about a significant problem that faces women but about our culture. A very valuable book.

Susan Griffin

#35. All forms of books make a valuable contribution to education and the dissemination of culture and information. The diversity of books and editorial content is a source of enrichment that we must support through appropriate public policies and protect from uniformity.

Irina Bokova

#36. Paste magazine has served as a tremendous window into culture for my house. I can think of no other publication that provides such critical yet entertaining thoughts on music, movies, books and gaming as Paste. My mailbox would be a dark place indeed without it.

Derek Webb

#37. Where has this book been? The Culture Engine demystifies the what and how of driving your company's culture to produce transformational business outcomes. Chris Edmonds operationalizes culture while offering practical tools necessary to align your people and gain profound competitive advantage.

Joseph Michelli

#38. The quotation-business is booming. No subdivision of the culture seems too narrow to have a quotation book of its own ... It would be an understatement to say that these books lean on one another. To compare them is to stroll through a glorious jungle of incestuous mutual plagiarism.

James Gleick

#39. In my book I don't just demonstrate that free enterprise is the most efficient way of organizing an economy - which it is. I also show that it's an expression of American values, and, thus, that a fight for free enterprise is very much a fight for our culture.

Arthur C. Brooks

#40. We will always return to the private and inviolable act of reading as our culture's way of developing an individual.

Guy Davenport

#41. 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.

Colson Whitehead

#42. One book calls to another unexpectedly, creating alliances across different cultures and centuries.

Alberto Manguel

#43. Unlike the book, with a documentary, you get a chance to show much more texture and color. Film gives you get a chance to focus on much more individuals who are pivotal in changing the landscape of American culture.

Steve Stoute

#44. I really want to do a book on the history of the no-wave music scene in New York, how it extended out and formed lots of other things. It was such a great visual culture.

Thurston Moore

#45. I wanted to write a book that showed how the subjectification of the "the murderer" has changed little in over a hundred years, and to argue that this "exceptional figure" serves a conservative function in modern culture that bears closer interrogation than it has commonly received.

Richard Marshall

#46. Most people in America want an easy read. I call it McFiction - books which pass right through you without you even digesting them. I don't mean a book that has two-syllable words. I mean chapters you can read in a toilet break. Happy endings. We are more of a TV culture.

Jodi Picoult

#47. As I've indicated, most books go out of print within one year. The same is true of music and film. Commercial culture is sharklike. It must keep moving. And when a creative work falls out of favor with the commercial distributors, the commercial life ends.

Lawrence Lessig

#48. Books and newspapers assume a "common reader" that is, a person who knows the things known by other literate persons in the culture. Obviously, such assumptions are never identical from writer to writer, but they show a remarkable consistency

Edward Hirsch

#49. There was a manifesto in the late '60s/early '70s, and it basically laid out what 'black art' was and that it should embrace black history and black culture. There were all these rules - I was shocked, when I found it in a book, that it even existed, that it would demarcate these artists.

Kara Walker

#50. Today we read books 'extensively,' often without sustained focus, and with rare exceptions we read each book only once. We value quantity of reading over quality of reading. We have no choice, if we want to keep up with the broader culture.

Joshua Foer

#51. I think our culture has gotten so skewed. People assume that because you're an actor you want to write a book to exploit your celebrity, but my celebrity is only a byproduct of me making movies. I have no intention of being a celebrity.

Jonah Hill

#52. The acquisition of culture requires repose, sitting quietly in a room with a book, or alone with one's thoughts even any crowded concert or art museum.

Joseph Epstein

#53. If you want to have a creative culture, you can't get it by reading books. You get it by example.

Barbara Corcoran

#54. The second challenge is to make sure that, growing up in this culture, they have a healthy view of life and God and Scripture. So, that's my other challenge. So, finding that balance is certainly no easy task but it can be very fulfilling. So, that's part of what we talk about in this book.

Alex Kendrick

#55. The Bible is a book of Science. Secular Humanism is a religion of mythology.

Michael J. Findley

#56. In the sense that Watchmen references movies, comic books, pop culture in general. It knows it's a movie. I really do like movies that ride that fine line, the razor's edge between parody and supporting the fake movie part of the movie.

Zack Snyder

#57. A phallocentric culture is more likely to begin its censorship purges with books on pelvic self-examination for women or bookscontaining lyrical paeans to lesbianism than with See Him Tear and Kill Her or similar Mickey-Spillanesque titles.

Robin Morgan

#58. Comic books are what novels used to be - an accessible, vernacular form with mass appeal - and if the highbrows are right, they're a form perfectly suited to our dumbed-down culture and collective attention deficit.

Charles McGrath

#59. The meaning of culture is nothing less than the conduct of life itself, fortified, thickened, made more crafty and subtle, by contact with books and with art.

John Cowper Powys

#60. An all-loving god would surely not damn his children to an eternity of torture simply for being born into a culture that believes in the wrong deity, follows the wrong holy book or attends the wrong type of church services.

Armin Navabi

#61. The point of this book is that being Scottish is more than just a matter of nationality or place of origin or clan or even culture. It is also a state of mind, a way of viewing the world and our place in it.

Arthur Herman

#62. '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.

James Dobson

#63. I guess my most prized pop culture possession is a signed first edition of the book 'Fight Club' by Chuck Palahniuk.

Jen Lancaster

#64. On January 15, I was traveling with four library books, including a copy of Just Culture, a book about safety issues. I later called my local library to apologize for leaving the books on the plane, and they agreed not to charge me for replacing them.

Chesley B. Sullenberger, III

#65. I wanted to do something new. The world is becoming a global village and we have to understand these different cultures. There is a Danish culture, an Israeli culture and so on. So if you want to go to Denmark, then read the book.

Enock Maregesi

#66. We do treat books surprisingly lightly in contemporary culture. We'd never expect to understand a piece of music on one listen, but we tend to believe we've read a book after reading it just once.

Ali Smith

#67. Instead of being a page-turner, 'Moby-Dick' is a repository of American history and culture and the essentials of Western literature. The book is so encyclopedic that space aliens could use it to re-create the whale fishery as it once existed on the planet Earth in the midst of the 19th century.

Nathaniel Philbrick

#68. I believe that culture begins in the cradle ... To do without tales and stories and books is to lose humanity's past, is to have no star map for our future.

Jane Yolen

#69. Growing up north of San Francisco, I immersed myself in the local landscape and in books about Native Americans, cowboys, and pioneers that seemed to ground me in it, but to pursue culture in those days meant being spun around until dizzy and then pushed east.

Rebecca Solnit

#70. Our culture constantly inundates us with new information, and yet our brains capture so little of it. I can spend half a dozen hours reading a book and then have only a foggy notion of what it was about.

Joshua Foer

#71. Wherever the Bible has been consistently applied, it has dramatically changed the civilization and culture of those who have accepted its teaching. No other book has ever so dramatically changed the individual lives and society in general.

John F. Walvoord

#72. Our religion was the religion of a Book. Man must be educated on Earth for Heaven. John Quincy Adams

Paul C. Nagel

#73. The bible is not a religious experience for me. This book bundles together the entire culture of Judaism: our language, our history, our geography. God is merely a byproduct of the bible.

Tommy Lapid

#74. We're living in a homogenized culture where everything is the same, and books are not a homogenized culture. They are extremely varied, and they're eccentric because they are the product of an individual mind. They are not, in any way, mediated.

Jeanette Winterson

#75. This book is about fighting back. The dominant culture -civilization- is killing the planet, and it is long past time for those of us who care about life on earth to begin taking the actions necessary to stop this culture from destroying every living thing.

Derrick Jensen

#76. As it stands there is a very strong argument that as the book trade becomes increasingly corporate it's our literary heritage that is at risk - a vital part of our culture.

Sara Sheridan

#77. The new book is a result of my well-documented ... absorption in Samurai movie culture. It's called 'The 47th Samurai: A Bob Lee Swagger novel,' and it takes Bob to Japan in search of the sword his father recovered on Iwo that has gone missing under extremely violent circumstances.

Stephen Hunter

#78. Some kind of philosophy undergirds every movie, commercial, lecture, or book. Everything we take into our minds is trying to teach us something about how we should think the world is. (Life Hacks, p.83)

Jon Morrison

#79. Every new book is a challenge. I could, of course, have stopped many years ago if it was only for money. But no, it is about building bridges among cultures, different cultures. When you want someone to understand something that is not forcefully in your culture, you use stories.

Paulo Coelho

#80. Of course it is very limiting to be labeled a lesbian or queer writer. We live in a homophobic culture, and even people who aren't hateful per se assume they won't get anything from a queer book.

Michelle Tea

#81. If you think it's worth writing a book about then that means you suspect that you're not the only one. You suspect that it has something to do with the larger patterns of your culture.

Lucy Corin

#82. In many ways, 'What Teachers Make: In Praise of the Greatest Job in the World' is just one big thank-you note to my teachers. The book is dedicated to my fifth and sixth grade English teacher, Dr. Joseph D'Angelo, a massive force of erudition, martial artistry, culture, and love.

Taylor Mali

#83. What should a good children's book be like? If you ask me, I can tell you after thinking long and hard: It must be good.

Astrid Lindgren

#84. A truly great work of art breaks beyond the bounds of the period and culture in which it is created, so final judgement on a current book has to be deferred until it can be seen outside this present moment.

Madeleine L'Engle

#85. When a psychiatrist writes a bestseller, he is then urged to write a book of advice. But I think our culture's awash in advice. The problem is we don't know whether it applies to us or whether we're an exception.

Peter D. Kramer

#86. 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.

Paul Theroux

#87. 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.

G-Eazy

#88. As a Swiss writer once said, "We wanted a labor force but human beings came," and what nobody had foreseen was that those workers would bring their mosques, their holy book, and huge swathes of their culture with them.

Terry Hayes

#89. Not every book is for everyone...which is comforting to know. Right? Anyway, isn't that what makes us a rich and wonderful culture. Murder and mayhem is a dish for a certain few...if you like it dig in, if not stick to more mundane reads. A.J. Rice

C.E. Hansen

#90. I just see in pop culture, music, visual art, books, etc., a real hunger for the new and different, and I think that's amazing. Satisfying this hunger is part of the responsibility of a creative person.

Porochista Khakpour

#91. Some people read business books looking for confirmation. I read them in search of disquiet. Confirmation is cheap, easy and ineffective. Restlessness and the scientific method, on the other hand, create a culture of testing and inquiry that can't help but push you forward.

Seth Godin

#92. Culture, like the kingdom of heaven, lies within us, and not in foreign galleries and books.

Randolph Bourne

#93. Imagine what our culture would be like if Americans sold ideas, words, and books with the same creativity we use to sell designer jeans, shampoo, and rock stars. Why, we might end up with people whos attention span for the printed word is longer than the time it takes to read a T-shirt.

Jim Trelease

#94. A child who can love the oddities of a fantasy book cannot possibly be xenophobic as an adult. What is a different color, a different culture, a different tongue for a child who has already mastered Elvish, respected Puddleglums, or fallen under the spell of dark-skinned Ged?

Jane Yolen

#95. The Book of the Heart provides a fresh perspective on the influence of the book as artifact on our language and culture. Reading this book broadens our appreciation of the relationship between things and ideas.

Henry Petroski

#96. The logic underlying the truism that one should always travel on a plane with a book is also precisely why bed-and-breakfast culture is to be avoided if at all possible. Namely, you might have to talk to someone.

David Rakoff

#97. In the "Intervention" section of the book we go into that looping from a battery of positions (where healer and sufferer are blurred). I'm very interested in "repetition and revision" (to use Suzan Lori-Parks's phrase) and in the culture's desire to loop or repeat.

Laura Mullen

#98. All the same, they [books] do serve some purpose. Culture doesn't save anything or anyone, it doesn't justify. But it's a product of man: he projects himself into it, he recognizes himself in it; that critical mirror alone offers him his image.

Jean-Paul Sartre