First Line Book Quotes

#1. I've always felt that I was a bit of an outsider to the British children's-book illustration scene, because I don't work in line and wash.

Anthony Browne

#2. I'd read a book called A Reliable Wife not too long before leaving on the world's strangest trip, and as I climbed into bed, a line from the novel crossed my mind: 'He had lost the habit of romance.

Stephen King

#3. I try to satisfy the desires that people have to have their books personalized. That's a value, or feature, of bibliophilia that may vanish. How do you get your e-book signed? The idea of people standing in line to get my signature in their book, it's hard to turn them away.

Chris Van Allsburg

#4. Urbino laughed. The Contessa, as usual when it came to things Venetian, was probably right.

Edward Sklepowich

#5. Well, it's my age group, anywhere from, I'd say 30 to 70. The biggest comment I get about the book is how honest it is and that people can relate to my circumstances going across the line. Anybody could learn and deal with this book from reading it.

Darlene Love

#6. The villagers marked the time in two ways: before the swamp and after. What came before was good. And all that came after was not.

Melanie Crowder

#7. When you read a line that is just so well-written you just close the book and stare at the wall for a minute.

Anonymous

#8. Rules for writing the first line? The last line?
First line: Make them want more.
Last line: Make them want the next book.

Darynda Jones

#9. Hugh Laurie (playing Mr. Palmer) felt the line 'Don't palm all your abuses [of language upon me]' was possibly too rude. 'It's in the book,' I said. He didn't hit me.

Emma Thompson

#10. Along this particular stretch of line no express had ever passed. All the trains
the few that there were
stopped at all the stations. Denis knew the names of those stations by heart. Bole, Tritton, Spavin Delawarr, Knipswich for Timpany, West Bowlby, and, finally, Camlet-on-the-Water.

Aldous Huxley

#11. How often does it happen that an obscure line finds its way into a periodical ... is requoted in every book that comes out during the next three months, and sleeps again!

Samuel Laman Blanchard

#12. I love book signings: kids waiting in line for you to scribble on their new books, haha!

Brian Jacques

#13. I've met men who've stood in long lines on my book tours, and they've said things like, 'I've read your books and they've changed the direction in my life, and I want to thank you.' I think they're standing in line for their wife or their mother or their sweetheart or somebody, but no.

Beverly Lewis

#14. The stars sparkled above the mist shrouded tents and caravans of the carnival. The night crackled with an odd vibration, as if a veil of peculiarity settled over the company.

A.F. Stewart

#15. Overheard at O'Banion's Beer Emporium: "Pardon me, darlin', but I'm writin' a telephone book. C'n I have yer number?

Henry D. Spalding

#16. What I had noticed is that there weren't a lot of women lining up to see a comic book movie, but they were going to line up to see 'The Devil Wears Prada,' which may have been something I wanted to address.

Bryan Singer

#17. It was lucky that snarking at Luke was habit by now: Elliot remembered a line from a book he'd read once, that habit was second nature, and nature stronger than the first. It was a comfort, to have a natural expression rather than one he had to pin on.

Sarah Rees Brennan

#18. I'm opening a store at the end of the month in the New York meatpacking district. I'm launching a line of bedding this summer, and I am writing a book that will be out next January.

Genevieve Gorder

#19. At one level, the message of the book of Ruth is that the life of the godly is not a straight line to glory, but they do get there.

John Piper

#20. has been done deliberately. In a clear-line comic-book such as the

Matas, Toni

#21. Nowhere in the Word of God is there any text or passage or line that can be twisted or tortured into teaching that the organic living church of Jesus Christ just prior to His return will not have every right and every power and every obligation that she knew in that early part of the book of Acts.

Aiden Wilson Tozer

#22. The great dividing line between books that are made to be read and books that are made to be bought is not the purely modern thing it seems. We can trace it, if we try, back to the first printing-presses ...

Agnes Repplier

#23. Look. (Grown-ups skip this paragraph.) I'm not about to tell you this book has a tragic ending, I already said in the very first line how it was my favorite in all the world. But there's a lot of bad stuff coming. William Goldman, The Princess Bride

Cornelia Funke

#24. There's a very thin line that separates readers and writers. You make a leap over that line when there's a book you want to read and you can't find it and you have to write it yourself.

Alice Hoffman

#25. If girls can be anything, let them be anything.

This is a book for any girl who ever felt she didn't fit in. You are not alone. You come from a long line of bold, strong, fearless women. Glory in that.

This is a book for anyone who ever underestimated a girl.

Jason Porath

#26. Everything has already begun before, the first line of the first page of every novel refers to something that has already happened outside the book.

Italo Calvino

#27. Then he says how it's no one's fault, it just happened, and I swear that it-just-happened line is the filmiest line in the Book of Excuses for Lame Boys.

Susane Colasanti

#28. They must be real people. And this means that every word in every line of speech must be accurate and full of some kind of meaning which stretches not only forward in the book but stems from before in the book.

John Steinbeck

#29. He would give every penny he has (such is the malignity of the germ) to write one little book and become famous; yet all the gold in Peru will not buy him the treasure of a well-turned line.

Virginia Woolf

#30. A romp in the hay lingers like the first line of a song, but your true love is the one you make a life with and write more than a line about, you write a whole book.

Garrison Keillor

#31. I found Uriah reading a great fat book, with such demonstrative attention, that his lank forefinger followed up every line as he read, and made clammy tracks along the page (or so I fully believed) like a snail.

Charles Dickens

#32. Whatever I did, even backed by Sting's cash and moral support, it turned to shit. I had reached the end of the line. I became a statistic. Jim Berryman, actor, comedian, bookie and lounge-lizard, was on the dole!

James Berryman

#33. When I think of my wife, I always think of her head.

Gillian Flynn

#34. Do you know that line of Kierkegaard's, Canon Chambers? "There are many people who reach their conclusions about life like schoolboys: they cheat their master by copying the answer out of a book without having worked the sum out for themselves."

James Runcie

#35. Books and novels in particular that grapple with quite a few things are difficult to explain, so I think that first line can come in a substitute for trying to form a longer sense of what the book is about.

Alice Sebold

#36. What in me is dark
Illumine, what is low raise and support,
That to the height of this great argument
I may assert eternal Providence,
And justify the ways of God to men. 1
Paradise Lost. Book i. Line 22.

John Milton

#37. Here's my favorite line from this book, spoken after a mother asked the coach how good this year's team was going to be. "Won't know for twenty years," the coach responded. "That's when we'll know what kind of husbands and fathers they'll be. That's when we know what kind of men they'll be.

Jeff Kirby

#38. When we have a clear idea of who we are and why we live, our lives become a journey. A story is created about our lives. And when the end comes, even if the story adds up to only one line, the story reaches a settled conclusion.

Ilchi Lee

#39. You hear all this stuff about inner peace. Hey, there's nothing wrong with it, but I say, hit that line hard. Crack that book - Do your very best all the time and inner peace will take care of itself. The Deacon guarantees it.

Deacon Jones

#40. I'd always rather stand or fall on my own mistakes. There's nothing worse than looking back, in a published book, at a line edit or a copy edit that you felt queasy about and didn't want to take, but took anyway.

Donna Tartt

#41. People think, 'Oh, well how can 'The Hobbit,' which is one book, become three films?' But you can take one line from an appendice and it turns into a whole sequence.

Andy Serkis

#42. Half the Sentinels and all the Guards moved back, forming the ohshit line.
Armentrout, Jennifer L. (2013-10-31). Sentinel (The Covenant Series Book 5) (p. 45). Spencer Hill Press. Kindle Edition.

Jennifer L. Armentrout

#43. [the best advice about women] was from Robert Evans. The line was in his book, but he told me, "When it comes to a woman's mind, I know nothing."

Slash

#44. 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

#45. The usual run of children's books left me cold, and at the age of six I decided to write a book of my own. I managed the first line, 'I am a swallow.' Then I looked up and asked, 'How do you spell telephone wires?

Bruce Chatwin

#46. My watch buzzed and told me I had ten minutes left to live. I turned my wrist to glance at it. Yep. This sucks.

J.M. Friedman. Succubus in Seattle (Kindle Locations 28-29).

J.R. Thorn

#47. The simplest comment on my book came from my ballet teacher. She said, I wish you hadn't made every line funny. It's so depressing.

Quentin Crisp

#48. All we need to do, reader or writer, from first line to final page, is be as open as a book, and be alive to the life in language - on all its levels.

Ali Smith

#49. That you should not be here when something we've both wanted happens is no new thing for me. Today too, as always, you're not here.

Sachin Kundalkar

#50. grief does not decline in a straight line or along a slow curve like a graph in a child's math book.

Helen Simonson

#51. Every single line on the Oscar show is negotiated. Unless you've been there, you have no idea how it is put together. It's like nothing else on earth. I'm writing a book about it, but I have to throw in my sexual escapades to make sure it sells.

Bruce Vilanch

#52. People would come and threaten them. And they would respond by putting the book in the window. Behind that, the publishers, many of whom were menaced and receiving anonymous phone calls of the very menacing kind and so, almost everybody - not everybody, but almost everybody held the line.

Salman Rushdie

#53. God really must have had a sense of humor, because if I had to name my biggest turn-on, it was literature. And he had just recommended a book that I didn't know, that wasn't taught in school. If I were single, there would be no better pick-up line.

Kody Keplinger

#54. 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

#55. Another one of the line-item vetoes in the "never drink alone" rule book is that you're allowed to drink alone while traveling. Who else could possibly join you? I loved drinking alone in distant bars, staying on speaking terms with my own solitude.

Sarah Hepola

#56. She's been reading too much, he thought -had drifted across that line that separated what you might find in a book from what you might do

Chad Harbach

#57. Feathers fell from the sky. Like black snow, they drifted onto an old city called Bath.

Stefan Bachmann

#58. You cannot simply read the Quran,not if you take it seriously.You either have surrendered to it already or you fight it.
It attacks tenaciously,directly,personally; it debates,criticizes,shames and challenges.
From the outset it draws the line of battle, and I was on other side.

Jeffrey Lang

#59. I began to read the Holy Scriptures upon my knees, laying aside all other books, and praying over, if possible, every line and word. This proved meat indeed and drink indeed to my soul. I daily received fresh life, light and power from above.

George Whitefield

#60. Don't mean to sound weird but I get so immersed in the source material when I'm working on a movie that I kind of lose the line between what I thought of and what was in the book.

Zack Snyder

#61. I went to a bookstore to try to find a book. The bottom line is, it all comes by trial and error. It was scary and exciting at first you don't know what to expect. But once you look into your child's eyes, you forget about that.

Michael Jordan

#62. It's quite a library, anyway," she said, trying to sound upbeat. "I've begun to think of it as more graveyard than library. End of the line, you know. Where book-of-the-month club comes to die." As

Matthew J. Sullivan

#63. Oh, friend, forget not, when you fain would note
In me a beauty that was never mine,
How first you knew me in a book I wrote,
How first you loved me for a written line ...

Edna St. Vincent Millay

#64. The one that came really easy was the Japanese lover, because he's like a ghost in the book. He's always in the background like a spirit, like a shadow, almost. There's a very delicate line there.

Isabel Allende

#65. I read the 'Deadpool' series back in the '90s. I'm not, like, a huge comic book reader, per say, though. I'll check out 'Archie' when I'm in the grocery line, but that's about it.

Ryan Reynolds

#66. I dreamt a limitless book,
A book unbound,
Its leaves scattered in fantastic abundance
On every line there was a new horizon drawn,
New heavens supposed;
New states, new souls.

Clive Barker

#67. I was really the first-line editor of the 'House of Night' series. I didn't write that much of the story, and I didn't know what was happening until my mom finished the book and sent it to me because I wanted to read it with fresh eyes as a general reader would.

Kristin Cast

#68. A book sometimes seems to impose a through-line to life that real life doesn't actually have.

Chris Ware

#69. I love getting attention, just like a child loves it, and it's never worn off. So when people say, oh the book signings go on, why would I shoo away someone who's giving me attention? What part of standing in line for 10 hours to say how much they love you is bad to you?

David Sedaris

#70. 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.

Patti LaBelle

#71. This book is the account of his redemptive journey - through innocence, bigotry, hard-line radicalism, and beyond - to a passionate advocacy of human rights and all that this can mean.

Maajid Nawaz

#72. If only one in 1,000 people that I talk to goes on to write a good book, that's one more good book that I've helped along ... and maybe it will be a book I love myself five or 10 years down the line.

Garth Nix

#73. We got up and smiled at each other. His eyes were lovely, and I was reminded of a line in a book I read once, that God exists in the spaces between people.

Susan Juby

#74. The cynic about human nature might say that religious morality is an effective way of keeping people in line. The threat of hell, the reward of heaven, but the rules of the holy books are out of date and often barbaric.

Richard Dawkins

#75. A single line in the Bible has consoled me more than all the books I ever read besides.

Immanuel Kant

#76. For me, language and how I use it are very important. I held back on doing a poetry book, walking the fine line between trying to be helpful and just putting more junk out there.

Sakyong Mipham

#77. I write books that way - I put a first line down and say, "Where does this go?"

Carl Reiner

#78. My dad liked more macho adventure books like Shogun or spy novels. My mother reads murder mysteries. In fact, so does her mother, my grandma. That's where I trace the familial line of murder mystery obsession.

Christopher Bollen

#79. Luckily, I always travel with a book, just in case I have to wait on line for Santa, or some such inconvenience.

David Levithan

#80. Be warned. This book has no literary merit whatsoever. It it a lurid piece of nonsense, convoluted, implausible, peopled by unconvincing characters, written in drearily pedestrian prose, frequently ridiculous and wilfully bizarre. Needless to say, I doubt you'll believe a word of it.

Jonathan Barnes

#81. Most authors liken the struggle of writing to something mighty and macho, like wrestling a bear. Writing a book is nothing like that. It is a small, slow crawl to the finish line. Honestly, I have moments when I don't even care if anyone reads this book. I just want to finish it.

Amy Poehler

#82. As in all Abercrombie's books, friends turn out to be enemies, enemies turn out to be friends; the line between good and evil is murky indeed; and nothing goes quite as we expect. With eye-popping plot twists and rollicking good action, Half a King is definitely a full adventure.

Rick Riordan

#83. Somewhere along the line, I realized that I liked telling stories, and I decided that I would try writing. Ten years later, I finally got a book published. It was hard. I had no skills. I knew nothing about the business of getting published. So I had to keep working at it.

Janet Evanovich

#84. You could write a book about things that you can't find on-line.

Maggie Stiefvater

#85. There's nothing on Earth like really nailing the last line of a big book. You have 200 pages to tickle their fancy, and seven words to break their heart.

Alex De Campi

#86. I was not allowed to take notes but my friend and I memorised those two and a half pages. Most people talked to me because of the warning. They knew this book was not going to be the official line.

Jung Chang

#87. Being able to say something lyrically, to say something that will do more than just be words, is really hard. It's easy to do when you're writing a chapter of a book or writing poetry, but it's really hard to do when you're confined to a melody line.

Nikki Sixx

#88. Whether a gastronomic tour of Italy, an elegant meal at the home of an Italian acquaintance, or "cooking Italian" back in one's own kitchen, the prospect is mouth-watering.

Claudia Piras

#89. Look - The moon thumbs through night's book. Finds a lake where nothing is printed. Draws a straight line. That's all it can. That's enough. Thick line. Straight toward you. - Look.

Rolf Jacobsen

#90. When the world kicks your ass, don't step in line.
book: stuff i think about

Sondra Faye

#91. You can learn a line from a win and a book from a defeat.

Paul Brown

#92. Bottom line: There is probably no better way to close a sale or get hired for a job than to pull a book out of your briefcase and let the person across the table know you are the expert in the industry.

Jim F. Kukral

#93. In the manner of one recognizing a line from a familiar poem in a strange book.

Neil Gaiman

#94. There is something unique about the size, and shape, and feel of a real physical book, and there is a real discovery about running your eye along a line of books and picking one out because it somehow LOOKS right.

Alexei Panshin

#95. Best line in the book:

"I played the part well, but I was as fake as a California tan on an Alaskan cheerleader.

Ali Parker

#96. I write in a very peculiar way. I think about a book for 25 or 30 years in a kind of inchoate way, and at one point or another, I realize the book is ready to be written. I usually have a character, a first line, and general idea of what the book is going to be about.

Charles McCarry

#97. 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

#98. When you are a free and independent writer, without employer, without hours or deadlines, you have to play little games to force yourself into the actual writing. For me, one game is to announce...that I have finally decided on my next book, that I am ready to write it...to put my pride on the line.

Irving Wallace

#99. She can't even chew gum and walk in a straight line, let alone write a book.

Liam Gallagher

#100. I always thought the front line was the bookstores. And bookstores around America, around the world did astonishingly well. They held the line. They didn't chicken out. You know, they defended the book. They kept it in the front of the store.

Salman Rushdie