Top 100 By The Book Sayings
#1. Horror. I can't manage it. I become
well
horrified. Self-help books have a similar effect.
When asked, "Any literary genre you simply can't be bothered with?" - (By the Book: Writers on Literature and the Literary Life from the NYT Book Review, by Pamela Paul)
Emma Thompson
#2. When I'm really into a novel, I'm seeing the world differently during that time - not just for the hour or so in the day when I get to read. I'm actually walking around in a haze, spellbound by the book and looking at everything through a different prism.
Colin Firth
#3. Our prayer is that as you read, you'll be struck not by the contents of this book, but by the book it's helping you open up; and that you'll praise not the author of this book, but the One he is pointing you to.
Timothy J. Keller
#4. We're on a tight leash. We gotta do things by the book so no shooting yourself or trying to blow me up this time."
"I thought we agreed that we weren't gonna talk about that anymore.
S.L.J. Shortt
#5. The fire of literacy is created by the emotional sparks between a child, a book, and the person reading. It isn't achieved by the book alone, nor by the child alone, nor by the adult who's reading aloud - it's the relationship winding between all three, bringing them together in easy harmony.
Mem Fox
#6. I have no regrets because I did everything by the book.
Alexis Arguello
#7. I write my own stories. I like telling stories to little children. I think the good thing about stories is they carry you to another place which you've never been. And you feel like you're just enveloped by the book and the characters.
Georgie Henley
#8. I'm not 'Mr. No-By-The-Book.' I just want to make sure the character is by the book.
Michael Connelly
#9. I worship God. Religion and worship are two different things to me. Religion is by the book. I think too many people rely on the textbook: 'OK, it says to do this and it says to do that, so if I do this, this, and that, then I still can go out and do wrong because I did this, this, and that.'
Eve
#10. 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
#11. Hunh," Lula said. "You sure got a stick up your ass. When did you get so play-by-the-book?" "I've always been play-by-the-book. You're the one who doesn't play by the book." "Well, I knew it was one of us.
Janet Evanovich
#12. Conrad glared at him coldly. Jed could detect no human feeling or care or empathy coming from the man. This was a man who did everything by the book, and it was obvious that he didn't let anything - emotions, mercy, kindness - affect his decisions.
Jay Allan
#13. Great fashion is all about surprise. It should always be about doing something that isn't by the book.
Reed Krakoff
#15. By the way, Wonder Woman is Amazonian, and historically accurate Amazonian women actually had only one breast. So, if I'd really go 'by the book' ... it'd be problematic.
Gal Gadot
#16. Yes, a bunch of carrots, observed directly, painted simply in the personal way one sees it, worth more than the Ecole's everlasting slices of buttered bread, that tobacco-juice painting, slavishly done by the book? The day is coming when a single original carrot will give birth to a revolution.
Paul Cezanne
#17. The worst advice I ever received from my dad was to play by the book. My old man used to flip out whenever I would try to branch out and do something different. Although he didn't do it on purpose, he really held me back in the beginning.
Dimebag Darrell
#19. He'd stolen his philosophy of editing from the old New Critics - it's just about the book. Not the author, not the market, not the reader ... one judged a book only by the book.
Tiffany Reisz
#20. The Book that made the nation was destroying the nation; the nation that had taken to the Book was rescued not by the Book but by the force of arms.
Mark A. Noll
#21. Never ever go by the book. They will want you to, but you musn't. If the lust is too strong, tear one page from a hundred books and make your own way. There is no formula for life, no equation on how to be a human being.
Christopher Poindexter
#22. You can't just plain die. You got to do it by the book.
Richard McKenna
#23. I've always been a rule-follower. Even when I was a kid, I tried to do everything by the book.
Steven Curtis Chapman
#24. Anatoly Karpov, his by-the-book opponent, was too conservative to pressure Kasparov early in the game, so Kasparov put the pressure on himself with a Queen's Gambit - and won.
Christopher McDougall
#25. It's funny that I got to do 'On the Road' because the thing that had the biggest impact on me growing up was reading books. I was very inspired by the book and this spirit of Dean Moriarty and how envious we all are of somebody who can be that carefree.
Garrett Hedlund
#27. 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.
N. T. Wright
#28. Bonkers doesn't go by the book-he doesn't even know there is a book.
Jim Cummings
#29. In every operation there is an above the line and a below the line. Above the line is what you do by the book. Below the line is how you do the job.
John Le Carre
#30. RVM Thoughts for Today
Some live Life strictly, following each and every rule rigidly. They go by the Book and get stuck by the Hook. Break free today , let conscience guide your way.
R.v.m.
#31. Doing it your own way, not having to go exactly by the book to be successful.
Ice Cube
#32. Some live Life strictly, following each and every rule rigidly. They go by the Book and get stuck by the Hook. Break free today, let conscience guide your way.-RVM
R.v.m.
#33. Mainly because not only did Lee not play by the book, Kai Mason had made an art of pissing all over the fucking book.
Kristen Ashley
#34. Currently he was going through the entire Nero Wolfe series by Rex Stout, He'd just finished Murder by the Book and was in the process of downloading Triple Jeopardy to his e-reader when the alarm went off.
Keith R.A. DeCandido
#35. Some lessons you learned by the book. Others you learned from cold hard experience. The latter may not be the best way to learn, but it damn well stuck.
Maya Banks
#37. You can't always go by the book, even in comedy.
Alan Bates
#38. I feel that women and men should free themselves up. It took me a while to get over my dysphoria about shopping in the men's section, trying on men's clothes, but when I was thinking about my life and the kind of woman I wanted to be, it was never just this by-the-book feminine thing.
Hari Nef
#39. With a small town mentality, you make a decision very early on as to whether you are going to do everything by the book or just go your own way and not care.
Bjork
#40. We try to have things both ways. We've always refused to live by the book and the rule; but then why start worrying because the world doesn't treat us by rule?
Doris Lessing
#41. That's still the best reading experience: falling in love with a book I meet by accident.
Alice Hoffman
#42. Learning from books and teachers is like traveling by carriage, so we are told in the Veda. But, the carriage will serve only while one is on the highroad. He who reaches the end of the highroad will leave the carriage and walk afoot.
Johannes Itten
#43. The fall of the Berlin Wall did more for the progress of freedom than all of the books written by myself or Friedrich Hayek or others.
Milton Friedman
#44. The change starts when you start watching a video. You don't see it, you don't feel it but it starts at this moment, just by reading a complicated book or watching a film you again change... It's a fact!
Deyth Banger
#45. I was the quiet kid in the corner, reading a book. In elementary school, I read so much and so often during class that I was actually forbidden from reading books during school hours by my teachers.
Cassandra Clare
#46. In the early '90s, I was finishing up my adolescence. I visited my local comic-book store on a weekly basis, and one week I found a book on the stands called 'Xombi,' published by Milestone Media.
Gene Luen Yang
#47. 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
#48. Sometimes I'll read a book and feel it was written just for me. Then I'll flip the book over to look at the cover to see who wrote it, only to discover that it feels like it was written for me because it was written by me.
Jarod Kintz
#49. In the planning stage of a book, don't plan the ending. It has to be earned by all that will go before it.
Rose Tremain
#50. I feel that a book is never written by the writer alone
it's written by him and everyone around him be it directly or indirectly
Subhasis Das
#51. He who combines the useful and the pleasing wins out by both instructing and delighting the reader. That is the sort of book that will make money for the publisher, cross the seas, and extend the fame of the author.
Horace
#52. Growing maturity is marked by the increasing liberties we take with our travelling ... we made the discovery (some people never make it) that real books can be taken on a journey and that hours of golden reading can so be added to its other delights.
C.S. Lewis
#53. Ever since I was twelve, I dreamed of being an author. I just never had the fortitude to see any of my stories through to completion. I would start a book, get a few chapters in, and grow bored or get distracted by something else.
Hugh Howey
#54. 'Whale Talk' is a tough book, but it is also a compassionate book about telling the truth and about redemption. I didn't draw the tough parts out of thin air; they are stories handed to me by people in pain.
Chris Crutcher
#55. Read a short story every day. By the end of the week you would have read volumes of stories.
Lailah Gifty Akita
#56. My point is there will always be vile men, just as there will always be men of kindness and compassion ... This world is a troubled, savage, place. It would, however, even be more ghastly if only evil men took time to master weapons. - Waylander from the book Hero in the Shadows by David Gemmell
David Gemmell
#57. No one book of scripture can be understood by itself, any more than any one part of a tree or member of the body can be understood without reference to the whole of which it is a part.
Charles Hodge
#58. I always feel like my book is a success when I see a child reading it, and they have their pointer finger out, and they kind of keep their place as they look all around the page. I've always been impressed by how children are so observant.
Jan Brett
#59. How about your favorite book?" "This Side of Paradise by From. Scott Fitzgerald." "Why?" "Because it was the last one I read.
Anonymous
#60. University printing presses exist, and are subsidised by the Government for the purpose of producing books which no one can read; and they are true to their high calling.
Francis Cornford
#61. A writer who wishes to be read by posterity must not be averse to putting hints which might give rise to whole books, or ideas for learned discussions, in some corner of a chapter so that one should think he can afford to throw them away by the thousand.
Georg C. Lichtenberg
#62. I think there's a possibility that comic book movies are getting a tiny bit better on the one hand because they're no longer made by executives, who are, you know, ninety-year-old bald tailors with cigars, going, 'The kids love this!'
Joss Whedon
#63. We take it for granted we know the whole story - We judge a book by its cover and read what we want between selected lines.
Axl Rose
#64. What worthwhile book after the Pentateuch has been written by a committee?
George Steiner
#65. In the quiet spaces opened up by the prolonged, undistracted reading of a book, people made their own associations, drew their own inferences and analogies, fostered their own ideas. They thought deeply as they read deeply.
Nicholas Carr
#66. His book, The Dreams of Ada, was published by Viking in April 1987 and was greatly anticipated by the town.
John Grisham
#67. The way I challenge myself is by writing something that really engages me, that doesn't have an easy answer, and isn't always an easy book to write.
Jodi Picoult
#68. There were some particular themes that I knew I wanted to hit, and when I got deeper into the project I found that it was becoming serious in and on its own. By the end, it's not very funny at all. I think, now, that part of the power of the book is that the jokes are kind of sparkly distractions.
Moshe Kasher
#69. Read The Charisma Factor - How to Develop Your Natural Leadership Ability by Robert J. Richardson and S. Katharine Thayer. It is a superb book for any aspiring leader, or a current one, who seeks to advance to the next level. 195.
Robin S. Sharma
#71. My second book, Follow Me Down had some success, got good critical notices, went into a second printing and things like that, but Shiloh was by far the most successful of those first five novels.
Shelby Foote
#72. Do not believe a thing because you have read about it in a book. Do not believe a thing because another man has said it was true. Do not believe in words because they are hallowed by tradition. Find out the truth for yourself. Reason it out. That is realization.
Swami Vivekananda
#73. She rolled her eyes. "If it pleases Your Magnanimous Holiness, I shall call you by your first name." " 'Magnanimous Holiness'? Oh, I like that one." A ghost of a smile appeared on her face, and Dorian looked down at the book.
Sarah J. Maas
#75. Writing a mystery is like drawing a picture and then cutting it into little pieces that you offer to your readers one piece at a time, thus allowing them the chance to put the jigsaw puzzle together by the end of the book.
Ashwin Sanghi
#76. What do you do when people don't get what you're doing, when they're confused by a book, or a direction you're going in? When the critics don't like it." The answer was a brief pause, then: "Fuck 'em.
Anonymous
#77. When I was young, my favorite picture book was 'Fletcher and Zenobia,' written by Edward Gorey and illustrated by Victoria Chess. It's long out of print now, but its mix of macabre humor and 1960s psychedelia made it a perfect children's book for the times.
Rick Riordan
#78. Some people say, 'Do not judge the book by its cover!' Well, I say not to judge at all. People can say anything they want to say, but for me, cover does matter.
Toba Beta
#79. We are to have no pictures which the puritan and the narrow, animated by an obsolete dogma, cannot approve of. We are to have no theaters no motion pictures, no books, no public exhibitions of any kind, no speech even which will anyway contravene his limited view of life.
Theodore Dreiser
#80. I was nearly 40 when I published my first book. I was a slow starter - or rather, I was slow to gather my work together, though I had published translations, mainly of the Italian poet Montale, by then.
Jonathan Galassi
#81. The expectation was that 'True Confessions' would be my first published book, but that didn't happen. After it was rejected by every publisher in New York and Canada, I shoved it in a closet and went on to write and publish my next three books.
Rachel Gibson
#82. The White Queen in many ways it is representative of the sort of drama that I'm talking about. The books by Philippa Gregory were best sellers and they specifically told the story of history from the point of view of women.
Colin Callender
#83. In this book I do not intend to give a blow-by-blow description of a sex bout: I find them inartistic, clinical and unpoetic. The circumstances that lead up to sex I find more interesting.
Charlie Chaplin
#84. I wish I could write a beautiful book to break those hearts that are soon to cease to exist: a book of faith and small neat worlds and of people who live by the philosophies of popular songs.
Zelda Fitzgerald
#85. I once read a book by a former alcoholic where she described giving oral sex to two different men, men she'd just met in a restaurant on a busy London high street. I read it and thought, I'm not that bad. This is where the bar is set.
Paula Hawkins
#86. I was engrossed with the book, I was having difficulties with it, and I just didn't notice the years were going by.
Jeffrey Eugenides
#87. I agree we have enough books that attempt to explain why God allows suffering, presumably in a way that lets God off the hook. And while much smarter men than I have constructed elaborate systems in this pursuit, they are by definition exercises in speculation.
Tullian Tchividjian
#88. The Christians think I am making a mistake by not trying the New Testament and meeting Jesus. The Jews tend to think I am making a mistake by reading without support from educated people. After all, there is 2,000 years of scholarship about the book, they say, so it's perverse of me to ignore it.
David Plotz
#89. Remember, if confronted by a librarian while looking for a book to check out, do not attempt to escape by climbing a tree. There are no trees in the library and the precious moments it will take you to look around and realize this will allow the librarian to strike. Don't become a statistic.
Joseph Fink
#90. You know, in the old days, you might be able to slowly sort of build an audience for your work by publishing two, three novels before you hit it big. You know, now, there's much more of an emphasis in the publishing houses on making sure that every book makes money.
Chad Harbach
#91. The plot is so tired that even this reviewer, who in infancy was let drop by a nurse with the result that she has ever since been mystified by amateur coin tricks, was able to guess the identity of the murderer from the middle of the book.
Dorothy Parker
#92. There's a book that's critical to understanding anxiety, a 17th-century book, 'The Anatomy of Melancholy,' by Robert Burton. I wanted to write something like that.
Scott Stossel
#93. At first the boys were puzzled by illness. They looked at their father from the other side of a wall of pain, bewildered that their father stood writing in his book, when he had only to reach over the division and lift them clear of it.
Diane Setterfield
#94. Ray Bradbury's definition of a book is at the end, when he points out that we should not judge our books by their covers, and that some books exist between covers that are perfectly people-shaped.) - Neil
Ray Bradbury
#95. My favorite anything is always relative to the context of present time, place and mood. When I finish a book and want to immediately find another by the same author and no other, that author is elevated to my favorite.
Amy Tan
#96. A true martial artist, in my books anyways, is someone who is going to do the right thing and lead by example.
Duane Ludwig
#97. People aren't stupid. People wanna see good movies, especially comedies. Those by the books comedies, I don't get it. Who likes those? Nobody likes those.
Emma Stone
#98. There are many troubles which you cannot cure by the Bible and the hymn-book, but which you can cure by a good perspiration and a breath of fresh air.
Henry Ward Beecher
#99. There was a best-selling book in the late '60s and '70s called 'The Adventurers' by Harold Robbins. The lead character's name was Dax. Anyone that's roughly my age that's named Dax is named from that book.
Dax Shepard
#100. She always brought something when she came on Fridays, and this time it had been a book. A Wizard of Earthsea, written by someone called Ursula K. Le Guin, and already after the first few pages I knew that this was an absolutely fantastic book.
Karl Ove Knausgard
