Top 100 Book Done Quotes
#1. It was actually a very nice little book done by a gift book company. They illustrated it with pictures from 1920s football, before there were face guards.
Gregg Easterbrook
#2. You just don't give up. There have been times when everything seemed to conspire against getting a book done or printed, and I would feel like turning my back on the whole thing. But I came back and persisted.
Dee Brown
#3. Good omelettes are still hard to come by. They shouldn't be made in a hurried or slapdash manner. Some thought has to go into an omelette. And a little love too. It's like writing a book - done much better with some feeling!
Ruskin Bond
#4. Book collecting! First editions and best editions; old books and new books - the ones you like and want to have around you. Thousands of 'em. I've had more honest satisfaction and happiness collecting books than anything else I've ever done in life.
Peter Ruber
#5. The Internet, and the computers that made it possible, came from a rather dark place, much more missile than ballet, and they might yet return there. This book is about how and why that could happen, and what might be done about it.
Scott Malcomson
#6. By the time you write the last page you have done half the book. The other half tends to get done in about five weeks; I do several drafts, very, very furiously rewriting. I literally do more or less nothing else and I stick with it and go through it and I begin to hate it.
Terry Pratchett
#7. Being in front of an audience makes me feel alive. Being with friends makes me feel alive. I've done some crazy stuff in my time and yet I can feel infinitely alive curled up on a sofa reading a book. So, what makes me feel alive? I guess it's realizing I am part of the world around me.
Benedict Cumberbatch
#8. DELPHI/HERMIONE: What have you done? SCORPIUS/HARRY: I, uh, I opened a book. Something which has - in all my years on this planet - never been a particularly dangerous activity. The
J.K. Rowling
#9. The book is called 'A House in the Sky' because during the very, very darkest times, that was how I survived. I had to find a safe place to go in my mind where there was no violence being done to my body and where I could reflect on the life I had lived and the life that I still wanted to live.
Amanda Lindhout
#10. I don't talk about my books while I'm writing them: not even my husband knows what a novel's about until it's done.
Sarah Dessen
#11. I work most days and if you work most days and you get at least a page done a day, then at the end of the year you have 365. So the pages accumulate and then I publish the books.
Philip Roth
#12. She felt moved to read the book in secret and solitude, though none of the others had done so, - to hide it from view at the sound of approaching footsteps.
Kate Chopin
#13. You write a book and you finish the book. That's your job done, right? You win the Booker and you have a whole new job. You have to be the thing, right? So instead of writing the story, you somehow are the story. And that I found that sort of terrible.
Anne Enright
#14. When I write a book I'm always questioning the project as a whole. I always feel I might have to just throw it away and forget about it, and I've done that with novels I've started and worked on for a long time. It's an option I need in order to write freely.
Daniel Kehlmann
#15. When I was putting the 'Best of Hollywood' book together, I sat down and added up just the list of Westerns I've done, and it came to well over 200.
James Best
#17. I like to get ten pages a day, which amounts to 2,000 words. That's 180,000 words over a three-month span, a goodish length for a book - something in which the reader can get happily lost, if the tale is done well and stays fresh.
Stephen King
#18. I'm so used to being separate from the publication process. I turn in the book to the editor and then I'm done.
Hilary Liftin
#19. From now on whenever I read a math book, I'm going to try to figure out by myself how everything was done, before looking at the solution. Even if I don't figure it out, I think I'll be able to see the beauty of a proof then.
Donald E. Knuth
#20. 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.
Ernest Hemingway,
#21. When a writer has done the best that he can do, he should then withdraw from the book-writing business and take up an honest trade like shoe repair, cattle stealing, or screwworm management.
Edward Abbey
#22. I'm aware of cliches and I'm aware of experiments that have been done and I'm aware of a kind of deadness to a lot of realism both in the language and in the structure of a book.
Jeffrey Eugenides
#23. What really knocks me out is a book that, when you're all done reading it, you wish the author that wrote it was a terrific friend of yours and you could call him up on the phone whenever you felt like it. That doesn't happen much, though.
J.D. Salinger
#24. I've done 80 books and if anyone has entertained the idea of owning one of my books, I think this is the book that covers all the bases. I'm very proud of it.
Art Wolfe
#25. I am writing a book. I have got the page numbers done.
Stephen Wright
#26. I got done writing Ports of Call and suddenly realized I have far too much material for the book.
Jack Vance
#27. There has to be something we can do to undo whatever it is we have done.
Ellen Mead
#28. You write a book, and after 50 pages you think it's about one thing, and then you write another hundred and you realize it's about something else, and then by the time you're done, you can look back and say, 'Oh, this is what it's about.'
Jami Attenberg
#29. I take my books everywhere. Plane journeys are a good opportunity to study, or also when I'm having my hair done.
Lily Cole
#30. I haven't had a chance to pick up a good book in a long time, because I've been either reading scripts or learning them or writing them. And so, by the time the day is done, I usually just want to click on The Bachelor and fall asleep. But I gravitate toward biographies and things like that.
Justin Theroux
#31. I'm a third done into a new book but sorry - I have a superstition about talking about it!
Joanna Trollope
#32. There is no doubt something will be done sooner or later to enable us to put on a house every day, just as we put on clothes or choose a book to read or a theater to go to, like choosing a day to be lived, within the limits grated by other destinies or chances.
Ettore Sottsass
#33. I think my biggest problem, though, at least in drafts, is not repeating myself. After eight books I get worried that a character or piece of dialog might be too much like something I've already done. So it's a challenge to keep it fresh.
Sarah Dessen
#34. My company, Against All Odds Productions, has done print on demand; we were the first to do a book with a CD-ROM in the early 1990s. We do custom covers. It's always fun to do something new.
Rick Smolan
#35. He needs no library, for he has not done thinking; no church, for he is himself a prophet; no statute book, for he hath the Lawgiver; no money, for he is value itself; no road, for he is at home where he is.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
#36. I haven't even graduated from high school yet - and I've realised in the last four years, with all the travelling I've done and all of the movies I've made, that the world is my classroom. I've experienced things I don't know you can necessarily get from reading a history book.
Hailee Steinfeld
#37. When I'm writing a book, I prefer not to speak about it, because only when the book is finished can I try to understand what I've really done and to compare my intentions with the result.
Italo Calvino
#39. I go too long without picking up a good book, I feel like I've done nothing useful with my life.
Jane Austen
#40. You cannot simply tap your creative nature once and then expect to be done with it. It is a lifelong process: a continual commitment to being open to possibility, trusting your instincts, experimenting, taking risks, and revising.
Fran Sorin
#41. I thought my book was done, then we went to Hawaii and the whole last chapter happened.
Mariel Hemingway
#42. I like characters who are changed, often for the better, by the dark nature of their experiences. I also can become engaged by a character for whom I wish to see justice done, one way or the other. In general, I require a book to have some sort of moral center.
Thomas H. Cook
#43. Most of my painting is done sitting in a chair with a book. I'd say it's 80 per cent sitting and reading, 10 per cent eating and ten per cent painting.
Susan Rothenberg
#44. I did the pilot, and when they came through and said they were going to put it on the air, I had already some dates in the book with my band and so on. So Barry did the first one, he may have done a few more than the first one in the series, and I took it up from then.
Humphrey Lyttelton
#45. Every night, before he turned in, he would write in the book. He wrote about things he had done, things he had seen, and thoughts he had had. Sometimes he drew a picture. He always ended by asking himself a question so he would have something to think about while falling asleep.
E.B. White
#46. I'm always worried about how fans of the books will react, but we have kept true to a lot of the books. Obviously there are changes, but with the books as a basis, hopefully the fans will like what we have done.
Dominic Sherwood
#47. (On the book "Been Down So Long It Looks Like Up To Me") Coming on like the Hallelujah Chorus done by 200 kazoo players with perfect pitch. Hilarious, chilling, sexy, profound, maniacal, beautiful and outrageous all at the same time.
Thomas Pynchon
#48. When all is said and done and the e-book is written about politics and the Internet, it is not going to be about the presidential election. It will be about the smaller elections in aggregate that have a huge effect on people's lives.
Joe Green
#49. I'm, like, a real nerd, in that I will take a book that is three inches thick and disappear and not leave until it's done.
Julia Jones
#50. It's not in my nature to chop people's heads off, per se, or rob a bank or any crazy thing I've done on screen. I'm just comfortable reading a book or spending time with my wife and my daughter or watching the fight on TV with the fellas.
Bokeem Woodbine
#51. What he's done is recognise the cinematic nature of the book. It's beautifully realised - it's a beat film.
Tilda Swinton
#52. I've made mistakes, I've misspoke, I am sure I will again sometime, but that happens, that's part of being human in my book. I'm OK with that. I've never done it maliciously, ever.
Curt Schilling
#53. I believe that the harm which Mill has done to the world by the passage in his book on Political Economy in which he favours the principle of Protection in young communities, has outweighed all the good which may have been caused by his other writings.
Richard Cobden
#54. The first series I wrote, 'L.A. Candy,' was always meant to be a three-book series, so when I started out it was all outlined that way and by the time I was done with the third book, I had become so involved and the process and the stories, I was a little bit sad to be done.
Lauren Conrad
#55. The book is so rich and yet it is well done. A rare achievement indeed!
Gil Kalai
#56. Once a book is published, it no longer belongs to me. My creative task is done. The work now belongs to the creative mind of my readers. I had my turn to make of it what I would, now it is their turn.
Katherine Paterson
#57. He was, in military life, a sergeant. Casson had already guessed that by the time he got around to mentioning it. A sergeant: good at getting things done. By the book so long as it worked. By being crooked if that's what it took.
Alan Furst
#58. At least I'm at peace with myself. I have done my best to write a book about what really happened there and why it happened and it's done, it's published. I won't write another book on Vietnam.
Neil Sheehan
#59. Man, Books & Booze is cool, right?. That's the most fun I've had in an interview this year. Definitely the most singing I've done.
Jeremy Robert Johnson
#60. Comic-book pages are vertical, and movie screens are relentlessly horizontal. But it's all the same form. We use different tools, but we get the job done. I'm completely in love with CGI. It's great for conveying a cartoonist's sense of reality.
Frank Miller
#61. The true test of any scholar's work is not what his contemporaries say, but what happens to his work in the next twenty-five or fifty years. And the thing that I will really be proud of is if some of the work I have done is still cited in the text books long after I am gone.
Milton Friedman
#62. It wasn't premeditated. It was what needed to be done. So I did it.
Milly Silver
#63. I just increasingly enjoy the quiet moments when I can be on my own with my friends and family, or with a book, having a live experience. That's really what I crave, and I always have done.
Benedict Cumberbatch
#64. If I want to write a movie, I'll write a screenplay, but if I have an idea for a book, it's something that I think can only be done novelistically.
Bret Easton Ellis
#65. The book is closed, the year is done, the pages full of tasks begun. A little joy, a little care, along with dreams, are written there. This new day brings another year, Renewing hope, dispelling fear. And we may find before the end, a deep content, another friend.
Arch Ward
#66. My doctors were of one mind: unless something was immediately done, I had maybe six months to live. A quintuple bypass was suggested. Quintuple! I was impressed, though somewhat disturbed because I was in the middle of work on a new book.
Studs Terkel
#67. After ten standard months I was done, acknowledging the ancient aphorism to the effect that no book or poem is ever finished, merely abandoned.
Dan Simmons
#68. Whenever I see an autobiography for sale in the book store i just flip to the about the author section. I'm like, "Done, next!"
Demetri Martin
#69. If I'd learnt one thing from travelling, it was that the way to get things done was to go ahead and do them. Don't talk about going to Borneo. Book a ticket, get a visa, pack a bag, and it just happens.
Alex Garland
#70. I grew up around books. When I first held the book and it was a substantive, tangible thing, and I thought of all the work that went into it, not just my work but everybody else's and the research and so forth, there's a sense of really have done something worthwhile.
Paul Allen
#72. I am an inveterate homemaker, it is at once my pleasure, my recreation, and my handicap. Were I a man, my books would have been written in leisure, protected by a wife and a secretary and various household officials. As it is, being a woman, my work has had to be done between bouts of homemaking.
Pearl S. Buck
#73. There's nothing to match curling up with a good book when there's a repair job to be done around the house.
Joe Ryan
#74. Some of the most famous books are the least worth reading. Their fame was due to their having done something that needed to be doing in their day. The work is done and the virtue of the book has expired.
Moliere
#75. I might go on discussing this subject at great length, but after all is said, done, and written, my own book of experiences will best show what these obstacles are, and how I managed to overcome them to some extent.
Major Taylor
#76. Because this absolutely insane - the craziest thing I'd ever done. Worse than giving a one-star review, scarier than asking for an interview with an author I'd give my firstborn to eat lunch with, more stupid than kissing Daemon.
Jennifer L. Armentrout
#77. When I'm done with a book, I always give it to someone with expertise in the topic and tell them to flag all of my stupid mistakes.
Mary Roach
#78. You should spend more time reading the Good Book and less reading all those novels. What are you going to tell the Lord on Judgement Day when He asks you why you didn't read your bible? Hmm?
I will tell Him that His press agents could have done with a writing lesson or two, I said. To myself.
Jennifer Donnelly
#79. The Structure of Magic I by Richard Bandler and John Grinder is a delightful simplification of the infinite complexities of the language I use with patients. In reading this book, I learned a great deal about the things that I've done without knowing about them.
Milton H. Erickson
#80. Now, I saw, upon a time, when he was walking in the fields, that he was, as he was wont, reading in his book, and greatly distressed in his mind; and, as he read, he burst out, as he had done before, crying, What shall I do to be saved?
John Bunyan
#81. 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.
Nicholas Sparks
#82. I write a book over a period of months or years, and when I'm done with it, usually another year goes by before I see it in print. It's hard to be patient and wait.
Margaret Haddix
#83. Good books don't make you think, because the author has already done all of the thinking for you, but a terrible book can really give your brain a workout, because you spend so much time wondering what incredibly dumb thing the author will say next.
Joe Queenan
#84. I have done quite a few signings at bookstores, libraries and conferences. I have received phone calls and letters from people who liked the book.
Kate DiCamillo
#85. Fifty-two XIV. The Knitting Done XV. The Footsteps Die Out For Ever Book the First - Recalled
Charles Dickens
#86. I was very much inspired by the things that I'd seen and done in politics, but I was also desperate for a complete departure from the reality of my political experience. 'It's Classified' and my previous book 'Eighteen Acres' are both works of fiction, but if they do seem realistic, it's by design.
Nicolle Wallace
#87. I've done everything I've wanted to do. I have three children, I have grandchildren, I have books, I did movies, I've directed movies, I've done almost everything I've wanted to do.
Carl Reiner
#88. The Bible has done more harm than any other book in the world.
William Floyd
#89. You want to get your book to press. You rush it through. Revision number twenty - done. Do you really need twenty more? Yes. A half-baked book is a half-birthed child. It aborts, is put on life support; reviewers line the hall to pull the plug.
Chila Woychik
#90. nothing that seemed to have anything to do with what she'd done her entire life, the only job she wanted: finding the right book for the right person. She
Jenny Colgan
#91. The more I want a book to be done, the faster I type because I just want to get it out.
John Scalzi
#92. It was 1978 when Superman came out, and I kept thinking, Why don't they do something about it? They've done all these crappy attempts at comic book film adaptations. What can we do different? Why don't we just re-release this thing?
Richard Donner
#93. I adore book-to-film adaptations when they're done well, and I'm more lenient than many readers when it comes to what counts as 'done well.' For me, the most important thing is that the film maintains the spirit of the original book.
Maggie Stiefvater
#94. She needed a break from me. Well, real ones anyway. Fictional men were fine: they knew their place. You could just pick up a book, flick through to the right page, take your fill of your favorite hero and then return them to the shelf. Job done.
Victoria Connelly
#95. The judgment: You are now before Yama, King of the Dead. In vain will you try to ... deny or conceal the evil deeds you have done ... the mirror in which Yama seems to read your past is your own memory, and also his judgment is your own. It is you yourself who pronounce your own judgment, ...
Gautama Buddha
#96. Great books are written for Christianity much oftener than great deeds are done for it. City libraries tell us of the reign of Jesus Christ but city streets tell us of the reign of Satan.
Horace Mann
#97. If you have known how to compose your life, you have done a great deal more than the person who knows how to compose a book. You have done more than the one who has taken cities and empires.
Michel De Montaigne
#98. I think I have done well, if I have acquired a new word from a good author; and my business with him is to find my own, though itwere only to melt him down into an epithet or an image for daily use.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
#99. I like to think that each book I start is a completely new departure But I've learned that whatever you do, readers will have no difficulty assimilating it into what you've done before.
Ian McEwan
#100. You know, now it's sinking in. It's taken me a long time to realize - and it is sinking in - how important this book is. And I have a certain distance now. I've done it such a long time ago.
Eric Carle
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