Top 100 Great Book Quotes
#1. I went on a Buddha jag. I read 'Confession of a Buddhist Atheist' by Stephen Batchelor and Karen Armstrong's biography of Buddha, which is a great book.
Denis O'Hare
#2. Everybody knows by now that there's a gazillion books on me either out or coming out in the near future. So I'm encouraging anybody who's ever met me, heard me or even seen me, to get in on the action and scribble their own book. You never know, somebody might have a great book in them.
Bob Dylan
#3. A book is a human fact; a great book like Seraphita gathers together numerous psychological elements. These elements become coherent through a sort of psychological beauty. It does the reader a service.
Gaston Bachelard
#4. A good book gets better at the second reading. A great book at the third. Any book not worth rereading isn't worth reading.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
#5. Examining the world in order to find consolation is very much like looking carefully over the pages of a great book in order to find our own name ... Whether we find what we want or not, our preoccupation has hindered us from a true knowledge of the contents.
George Eliot
#6. A great book seeks to explain causality, not correlation. It works to point out the circumstances in which it works, and where it doesn't. And in so doing, it is broadly applicable.
Clayton Christensen
#7. What you don't know would make a great book.
Sydney Smith
#8. The great book, always open and which we should make an effort to read, is that of Nature.
Antonio Gaudi
#9. The only difference was one of them was trying to make a perfect cake and one of them was trying to write a great book. But if we remove that from the equation, it's the same impulse and they are equally entitled to their ecstasies and their despair.
Michael Cunningham
#10. You cannot be afraid, Read the book. Smile at it. It's a great book-the greatest book you've ever read.
Markus Zusak
#11. The fact that at the moment the distinction is being made, a young adult, as opposed to an adult, is the one reading it. In other words, I don't entirely believe in the distinction. A great book is a great book, and it's impossible to say what part of a person is going to connect to it.
Kristin Cashore
#12. And I know there has never been a human being or a television show, no matter how great, that could measure up to a great book. But
Sherman Alexie
#13. A good book ... leaves you wanting to reread the book. A great book compels you to reread your own soul.
Richard Flanagan
#14. A good book tells a story, and the reader is either pleased or displeased, intrigued or bored. A great book invites the reader to respond, to argue, to challenge.
Harold S. Kushner
#15. Nobody sits down and says, 'Well, I'm going to write a bad book.' They sit down to write a great book, but it doesn't always turn out like that. The writer may do his best and still write a so-so book, and other times, it just flows easily. But I don't know how you can control that.
Gilbert Morris
#16. A great book begins with an idea; a great life, with a determination.
Louis L'Amour
#17. A truly great book should be read in youth, again in maturity and once more in old age, as a fine building should be seen by morning light, at noon and by moonlight.
Robertson Davies
#18. The first drafts of my novels have all been written in longhand, and then I type them up on my old electric. I have resisted getting a computer because I distrust the whole PC thing. I don't think a great book has yet been written on computer.
J.G. Ballard
#19. Being a bestseller doesnt mean they wrote a great book. Just means they knew a lot of people who would buy it.
David A. Santos
#20. Upon being given a Bible, President Abraham Lincoln replied, In regard to this Great book, I have but to say, it is the best gift God has given to man.
Elton Trueblood
#21. A great thing is a great book; but a greater thing than all is the talk of a great man.
Benjamin Disraeli
#22. Melville's example demonstrates the wisdom of waiting to read the classics. Coming to a great book on your own after having accumulated essential life experience can make all the difference.
Nathaniel Philbrick
#24. In my opinion, what makes a great book is something that is universally specific.
Anne Hathaway
#25. Go APE: Author a great book, Publish it quickly, and Entrepreneur your way to success. Self-publishing isn't easy, but it's fun and sometimes even lucrative. Plus, your book could change the world.
Guy Kawasaki
#26. It can be hard to write a skillfully entertaining fiction, but a great book wants to be more, and wants more from us.
Guy Gavriel Kay
#27. I definitely have a spiritual outlook. I don't usually read self-help books, but I read a great book by a guy called Wayne Dyer, The Power of Intention, which I loved. I'm not a religious guy, in fact I'm probably agnostic but I thought what this writer had to say was really powerful.
Chris Pine
#28. 'Undertones of War' by Edmund Blunden seems to get less attention than the memoirs of Siegfried Sassoon and Robert Graves, but it is a great book.
Pat Barker
#29. Virginia Woolf's great novel, 'Mrs. Dalloway,' is the first great book I ever read. I read it almost by accident when I was in high school, when I was 15 years old.
Michael Cunningham
#30. Nonviolent Communication by Marshall Rosenberg is a great book teaching a compassionate way to talk to people even if you (or they) are angry.
Joe Vitale
#31. A great book allows me to leap over that wall: in a deep, significant conversation with another consciousness, I feel human and unalone.
David Shields
#32. Few things linger longer or become more indwelling than that feeling of both completion and emptiness when a great book ends. That the book accompanies the reader forever from that day forward is part of literature's profligate generosity.
Pat Conroy
#33. When I had no money, and a great book came out, I couldn't get it. I had to wait. I love the idea that I have hardcover books here and at home that I haven't read yet. That's how I view that I'm rich. I have hardcover books I may never read.
Sherman Alexie
#34. Be skeptical about this one. It's a great book. But try to be a filter, not a sponge.
Stephen Chbosky
#35. A great book is a homing device
For navigating paradise.
A good book somehow makes you care
About the comfort of a chair.
A bad book owes to many trees
A forest of apologies.
J. Patrick Lewis
#36. Recognize the evidence through which the world speaks to us like a great book ...
Umberto Eco
#37. 'Looking For Alaska' by John Green is a very great book. I feel like every teenage girl says John Green's 'Fault In Our Stars,' but 'Looking For Alaska' is better.
Alessia Cara
#38. If we marvel at the artist who has written a great book, we must marvel more at those people whose lives are works of art and who don't even know it, who wouldn't believe it if they were told. However hard work good writing may be, it is easier than good living.
Katherine Paterson
#39. There is no Great American Novel," she said absently. "This nation is too big and too diverse to produce only one great book. We've got lots of them and there will be more written in the future. Art doesn't stand still.
Jayne Ann Krentz
#40. Ramona wasn't at home anywhere. She felt like a spy in life and the ending of every great book and each orgasm, and the sight of every homeless shopping bag lady infected her with a titanic yearning for the world to make an unscheduled stop.
Ann Druyan
#41. I think that the mark of a great book is that it will meet you wherever you're at and you'll feel and experience something new and different each time you read it.
Josh Radnor
#42. I have a great book. It's called Stantasyland. Except I don't have the money to buy a million copies to put it on the bestsellers list.
Stanley Victor Paskavich
#43. I've heard people, usually writers, say that no one wrote a great book after winning the Booker, but I honestly did not feel any big pressure. 'The Gathering' did hang over me in that it was darker than I thought at the time.
Anne Enright
#44. Are you busy?" the caller would ask. "Yes I'm working." Sitting in my chair, cats nearby, I was reading a great book. That was my job this year, and it was a good one. The salary was nonexistent, but the satisfaction was daily and deep.
Nina Sankovitch
#45. It takes a great reader to make a great book.
Orna Ross
#46. I love real books, paper books, but I also love buying online, and I think that people are more willing to take a chance to read something if it's cheaper - sometimes books on the Kindle are $6. A hardback book is $25. For $25, it better be a really great book. Or you're going to be mad.
Caroline Leavitt
#48. There is a great book out called 'Everything I Needed to Learn I Learned in Kindergarten,' and I believe that everything I ever needed to learn on guitar was in my first two years of hungry learning: Scotty Moore, Hank Marvin, Chet Atkins, Lenny Breau, Chuck Berry and Bo Diddley.
Randy Bachman
#49. Great book stands the test of time unlike my good self ...
Douglas Adams
#50. I was a big reader as a child. My father is a great book lover and a librarian, but he forbid me to read bad literature. I was not allowed to read Nancy Drew or books like that. I often say to him that me becoming a crime author is both a way of pleasing him and annoying him.
Asa Larsson
#51. There's a great book about that, "The Breaking Point" by Stephen Koch . It won't improve your opinion of [Ernest] Hemingway.
George Packer
#52. You'll learn that the key to a great book is editing - grinding, buffing, and polishing - not writing.
Guy Kawasaki
#53. There is actually a great book called Prima Donna by Rupert -Christiansen that deconstructs the myth. In fact, many of the women who were prima donnas were feminists and incredible forces for their time.
Rufus Wainwright
#54. I don't usually read self-help books, but I read a great book by a guy called Wayne Dyer: 'The Power of Intention,' which I loved.
Chris Pine
#55. You can write a great book and be ignored. Literary history is full of classics that were under-appreciated in their own time.
William Landay
#56. She would bring you some great book because she was a book matchmaker, because she loved books the way other girls loved clothes.
Deb Caletti
#58. The truly great books are always novels: 'Anna Karenina,' 'The Brothers Karamazov,' 'The Magic Mountain.' Just as with 'Shahnameh,' I browse these books from time to time to remember how a great book works on us or to teach my students at Columbia University.
Orhan Pamuk
#59. There's a great book about John Kennedy and his relationship to civil rights called 'The Bystander.' The title alone suggests that he did as little as possible, any minimal critical effort, to really facilitate civil rights in the White House.
Michael Eric Dyson
#60. A great book should leave you with many experiences, and slightly exhausted at the end. You live several lives while reading.
William Styron
#61. Grammar and ordinary language are bad guides to metaphysics. A great book might be written showing the influence of syntax on philosophy.
Bertrand Russell
#62. If you don't like peas,it is probably because you have not had them fresh.It is the difference between reading a great book and reading the summary on the back
Lemony Snicket
#63. God gave me this great book to preach from, and if He has put anything in it you think is not fit, go and complain to Him, not to me. I am simply his servant, and if His errand that I am to tell is objectionable, I cannot help it.
Charles Spurgeon
#64. I can't go into Oklahoma without thinking about Larry Clark's photography book 'Tulsa.' It's a great book about how life works.
Buzz Osborne
#65. That's the thing about a great book. Every time you read it, it's different, because you're different. You've changed since the last time you picked it up, things have happened to you.
Jessica Zafra
#66. Reading a great book causes jolts and frights.
Mason Cooley
#67. A great book is one, which really don't finish when it finishes.
Aman Jassal
#68. I have an ambition to write a great book, but that's really a competition with myself. I've noticed that a lot of young writers, people in all media, want to be famous but they don't really want to do anything. I can't think of anything less worth striving for than fame.
Zadie Smith
#69. I always thought that as much as I love 'White Jazz,' it became almost unfilmable at some point, because there are so many strands, so much, and it became so psychotic ... that's what made it such a great book, but those things would not carry over into the filmic realm, I thought, with ease.
Joe Carnahan
#70. No matter how much a man may study, reflect and meditate on all the books in the world, he is nothing more than a minor scribe unless he has read the great book.
Denis Diderot
#71. But you're kind of like a great book ... you know, you pick up a book at the bookstore because it has a beautiful cover ... but it's what's inside that pulls you in.
Miranda Kenneally
#72. The only way to write a great book is to write it with the eyes of a child who sees things for the first time.
Arnold Bennett
#73. Why do you read many books? The great book is within your heart. Open the pages of this inexhaustible book, the source of all knowledge. You will know everything.
Sivananda
#74. Most of the books that I've adapted I'm doing because I love the book and I feel like it's a great work of art in itself, and when it's a great book I feel as a director or a writer that I have a responsibility to rise to the level of the original. It makes me try to reach higher.
James Franco
#75. A great book feeds our soul and nourishes our spirit in a way nothing else can.
C.S. Lakin
#76. It must be a really great book because one can read it as a boy in one way, and then re-read it in middle life and get something very different out of it - and that to my mind is one of the best tests.
C.S. Lewis
#77. While they read and talked together, there was opened before them the great book wherein God has written, in the language of mountain, and tree, and sky, and flower, and brook, the things that make truly wise those who pause to read.
Harold Bell Wright
#78. A great book is a thing of mystery and beauty; it has the power to move you.
Neil Leckman
#79. A great book remains eternally in one's memory as today's legend.
Mayi Ngwala
#80. If you think success is about so many more things and is so much more arbitrary, then you can be much more open to the idea that you can be Ben Fountain and publish your great book at forty-nine.
Malcolm Gladwell
#81. 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.
Ezra Taft Benson
#82. This is natural: one must read Herodotus's book-and every great book-repeatedly; with each reading it will reveal another layer, previously overlooked themes, images, and meanings. For within every great book there are several others.
Ryszard Kapuscinski
#83. Now I've given up any hope of lasting fame or literary perfection. I don't care if I write a great book anymore, but just one which, whatever its flaws, will leave a record of my impossible life.
Jeffrey Eugenides
#84. Anything created by human beings is already in the great book of nature.
Antoni Gaudi
#85. Learn to take criticism. Your first draft won't be perfect, and it's damaging to the book to think that it is. Every great book you've ever read has been rewritten a dozen times. This is the hardest think to learn (trust me), but very, very important.
Patrick Ness
#86. I believe if you write a great book, the chances are it'll get a great reception.
Charlaine Harris
#87. The mark of a good book is that you're happy to come home to it. The mark of a great book is that you occasionally schedule your life to stay home with it.
Derek Thompson
#88. If you would write a book about that and give the answer to that question, that 'why?' - you would have a very great book
Kurt Vonnegut
#89. No one writes a great book every time out, or even a good book.
Stewart O'Nan
#90. The world is a great book ... they who never stir from home read only a page.
Augustine Of Hippo
#91. Writing a great book is like creating a gourmet meal! Those who thoroughly enjoyed your book will come back to get fed again.
Darrell Gibbs
#92. A great book increases my heartbeat as if I'm prey, melts my insides in anticipation of a first kiss, immerses me in its depths.
Carmen DeSousa
#93. Two must-haves for me are a great book and my iPod.
Kelly Clarkson
#94. Many believers get together to discuss a great book and mistakenly call it Bible study. That is, in fact, a book club with a spiritual theme.
Jen Hatmaker
#95. The most revealing books are the Holy Koran and the Holy Bible. The Bhagavad Gita is a great book as well, and the works of Buddha. These are the major influences on the world.
RZA
#96. Usually I am not a conspiracy theorist. I don't believe in the Bilderbergers as a conspiracy or the Trilateralists. But I am certain that the Communists killed JFK. There is a super great book called 'Legend' by Edward Jay Epstein that makes it all perfectly clear.
Ben Stein
#97. I would much rather be known as the mother of a great son than the author of a great book or the painter of a great masterpiece.
Rose Kennedy
#98. I like to read and dream and create music that is based on the imagery of text. If you have the combination of a great book and a great filmmaker, what could be better for the composer?
Howard Shore
#99. I think my great book is Born to Sing: An Interpretation and World Survey of Bird Song .
Charles Hartshorne
#100. Everything comes from the great book of nature.
Antonio Gaudi
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