Top 100 How To Books Quotes
#1. Just as composers go to concerts and artists visit galleries, writers read. You will learn, in the most enjoyable way, more about style and language from reading good literature than you will ever acquire from workshops and how-to books.
Judith Barrington
#2. I always send new writers to 'Writer's Digest Books' line-up of how-to books. I read them all when I was starting out, and they were very helpful.
Gail Z. Martin
#3. What don't I want to learn? I have how-to books, history, nature. Ain't nobody here saying, 'You'd better learn this.' But I still think I've got a head on my shoulders, and it pleases me.
B.B. King
#4. If you wanna plan for the long-run, stock up on paper, antibiotics, entertainment items, how-to books, and soap. If you're more interested in short-term gains, I'd say stick with knives, seeds, drugs, booze, coffee, and cigarettes.
Sara King
#5. The reason diets and other how-to's don't work for most people is the same reason most how-to books and courses don't work for most people. It isn't that the actions are wrong. It's that people don't keep doing them.
Jeff Olson
#6. I'm excited about how books work in a digital age. When you read a book, unlike a film, you are decoding symbols in order to 'see' the story, so it is collaborative in a way that a film can never be.
Steven Hall
#7. The expression Jake saw on all the faces, oldest to youngest, was the same: pure joy. Not just that, he thought, and remembered a phrase his English teacher had used about how some books make us feel: the ecstasy of perfect recognition.
Stephen King
#8. I read books that say if you want to keep sex hot you tell a person what you want. How do you tell 'em you want somebody else?
Elayne Boosler
#9. And we can read - there is always the prospect of escape, through books."
"Books are not a means of 'escape', Meta! Books are a means of knowledge, and of learning how to cope with the future.
Joyce Carol Oates
#10. He doesn't understand that books don't get used up. I've tried to explain that they aren't like clothes or furniture - that we keep them because we might want to read them again. And because they remind us of how we felt when we read them.
Paula Marantz Cohen
#11. We go to school to learn to work hard for money. I write books and create products that teach people how to have money work hard for them.
Robert Kiyosaki
#12. How much better if life were more like books, if life lied a little more, and gave up its stubborn and boring adherence to the way things can be, and thought a little more imaginatively about the way things might be.
Catherynne M Valente
#13. Was there ever a more horrible blasphemy than the statement that all the knowledge of God is confined to this or that book? How dare men call God infinite, and yet try to compress Him within the covers of a little book!
Swami Vivekananda
#14. The fear of failure is so great, it is no wonder that the desire to do right by one's children has led to a whole library of books offering advice on how to raise them.
Bruno Bettelheim
#15. WESLEY AYERS is the stranger in the halls of the Coronado. He is the Keeper in the garden who shares my secret. He is the boy who reads me books. He is the one who teaches me how to touch.
Victoria Schwab
#16. Jews read the books of Moses not just as history but as divine command. The question to which they are an answer is not, 'What happened?' but rather, 'How then shall I live?' And it's only with the exodus that the life of the commands really begins.
Jonathan Sacks
#17. Alone in the worn mahogany paneled library surrounded by hundreds of books that filled every shelf and lined every wall from floor to ceiling, Lady Butler contemplated, How odd it is that a room filled with millions of words can be so silent.
Lance Taubold
#18. Apparently Lord Wyndham did regularly donate books to various museums around London. They were usually ones which he had collected earlier, but which were no longer of interest to him or his associates. Irene twitched at the very notion. Give books away? How very frivolous, she finally said.
Genevieve Cogman
#19. Only a true reader will understand how lovely it is to read a book on rainy days.
Nicholaa Spencer
#20. I suspect that I'm not alone when it comes to altering my surroundings depending on how I feel at any particular moment: diving into a specific book, immersing inside a particular movie, devouring certain foods or humming to just the right song.
Barbara Brooke
#21. Captain Shotover: How much does your soul eat?
Ellie: Oh, a lot. It eats music and pictures and books and mountains and lakes and beautiful things to wear and nice people to be with.
George Bernard Shaw
#22. How good Mrs. West could have written such books and collected so many hard works, with all her family cares, is still more a matter of astonishment! Composition seems to me impossible with a head full of joints of mutton and doses of rhubarb.
Jane Austen
#23. This is a breakthrough to science! How can I destroy it? It is beautiful! I have never encountered an unequally conjoined twin that was alive!"
Dr. Lisa Sen The Malevolent Twin
Mary Sage Nguyen
#24. The Bible remained for me a book of books, still divine - but divine in the sense that all great books are divine which teach men how to live righteously.
Joseph Joubert
#25. am Slinklebert Petrovius Mordechai Smythe, but everyone calls me Slinky, mainly because nobody can ever figure out how to say my name properly.
Books
#26. One of the first things my father taught me was that the library was made for and available to me. It's a place where you not only learn from books but you learn responsibility - how to borrow, take care of, and give back.
Marcus Samuelsson
#27. I read my own books sometimes to cheer me when it is hard to write, and then I remember that it was always difficult, and how nearly impossible it was sometimes.
Ernest Hemingway,
#28. Conflict resolution,' said Nightingale. 'Is this what they teach at Hendon these days?'
'Yes, sir,' I said. 'But don't worry, they also teach us how to beat people with phone books and the ten best ways to plant evidence.
Ben Aaronovitch
#29. Television isn't inherently good or bad. You go to a bookstore, there are how many thousands of books, but how many of those do you want? Five? Television's the same way. If you're going to show people stuff, television is the way to go. Words and pictures show things.
Bill Nye
#30. One thing you can't intend is how you will be read. I hear it said a lot that my books are about the 'search for identity', and this is said admiringly, as if I meant to encourage such a search.
Zadie Smith
#31. Reading is important. If you know how to read then the whole world opens up to you
Barack Obama
#33. I can't actually wrap my mind around it easily - I can't really visualize what 2 million books looks like ... So I try to keep it real for myself by focusing on individual anecdotes of how my books have helped kids learn to love reading.
Rick Riordan
#34. I don't think of my books as being biographies. I never had any interest in doing a book just to write the life of a great man. I had zero interest in that. My interest is in power. How power works.
Robert Caro
#35. What's important about the artists we learn about in art history and see in all the art books is that they have somehow pushed the boundaries of what people think art is or should be, and that's how they've made their work relevant. That's what I'm trying to figure out for myself.
Kadir Nelson
#36. Writers are troubled about finding time to write and writer's block and publicizing books that aren't books yet. They agonize over how to write and what to write and what not to write.
Deb Caletti
#37. I like Disney stuff. No-one looks at 'Toy Story' and says,' Oh, that's just for kids.' Why is it that games can only appeal to a certain audience, but movies and books - I mean, how many adults read 'Harry Potter?'
Warren Spector
#38. These people that write books on how to succeed and how to think positively make millions because it's something that doesn't occur naturally.
Rush Limbaugh
#39. I recommend anybody go to a bookstore, go down the self-help or new-age section, and just walk those aisles. See what book jumps out at you; there's a good chance it's a book you need in your life. That's basically how I find the books that I read.
Tom Araya
#40. Changing the world doesn't require much money. Again, think in terms of empowerment and not charity. How much were Gandhi's teachers paid? How much did it cost to give Dr. Martin Luther King the books that catalyzed his mind and actions?
Tim Ferriss
#41. I didn't become a good writer until I learned how to rewrite. And I don't just mean fixing spelling and adding a comma. I rewrite each of my books five or six times, and each time I change huge portions of the story.
Louis Sachar
#42. Something about the beauty of the library and how many books there were made me feel really eager to read, and I couldn't wait to get some free time so I could go back there and explore.
Francine Prose
#43. There are people who must spend huge amounts of time composing these online diatribes against me, all about how disgusting and terrible I am and how no one should ever read my books, and it's not enough for them to hate me, they can't stand the fact that ANYONE likes me!
Poppy Z. Brite
#44. The biggest seller is cookbooks and the second is diet books - how not to eat what you've just learned how to cook.
Andy Rooney
#45. The thing with Rubik's cubes, sometimes you make them worse when you try to fix them. I didn't want to make her worse, and I also didn't know how to make her better.
K.A. Coleman
#46. I think when companies are struggling, they don't want to talk to the press. The guys who write business books aren't interested in it because nobody wants to learn what it's like to be a mess, you want to learn how to be successful. That's slanted the whole thing quite a bit.
Ben Horowitz
#47. It took me a long time to realise how many of our classic books on animals were by gay writers who wrote of their relationships with animals in lieu of human loves of which they could not speak.
Helen Macdonald
#48. I learned how to believe in myself. Learned how to set goals, you know, self help books man. I just read every single one I can get a hold of, and I still do.
Drew Carey
#49. The spirit of imagination smells exactly how the person inhaling it imagines it to smell.
S.A. Tawks
#50. How did pretty little Anna go from Westchester suburb brat to New York hooker? Now that's a story.
Stacey Trombley
#51. In fact, when Warren Buffett was once asked about the key to success, he pointed to a stack of nearby books and said, "Read 500 pages like this every day. That's how knowledge works. It builds up, like compound interest. All of you can do it, but I guarantee not many of you will do it.
Warren Buffett
#52. I have thought you could not give everything to your books and also to your children, so for a long time, I thought if I had a child or a family, I'd think, 'How would I support them?' because basically I would stop writing.
Sonya Hartnett
#53. Teaching was never a vocation for me. Certainly I never aspired to teach people how to live. I was what used to be called a scholar. I wrote books about dead people. That was where my heart was. I taught only to make a living.
J.M. Coetzee
#54. When I was a CEO, the books on management that I read weren't very much help after the first few months on the job. They were all designed to give you directions on how not to screw up your company.
Ben Horowitz
#55. I don't need a book to tell me how to be alive.
Marty Rubin
#56. We don't perceive a contradiction between writing books, making films or producing a television program. These days you can't choose how you want to express yourself anymore.
Alexander Kluge
#57. Even in times when it's difficult to figure out, how do you go forward, art - and books - always help.
Alice Hoffman
#58. How come regional pandering only works in one direction, right? You never see a Southern politician trying to win votes in New York State by saying, 'I read books and make a mean vegan meatloaf.'
Bill Maher
#59. Isn't it remarkable how everyone who knew [D.H.] Lawrence has felt compelled to write about him? Why, he's had more books written about him than any writer since Byron!
Aldous Huxley
#60. My ambition was to embrace those general qualities that Ernest Hemingway, a former newspaperman, once said should be present in all good books: 'the good and the bad, the ecstasy, the remorse and sorrow, the people and the places and how the weather was.'
Pete Hamill
#61. I'm afraid of coaching, of writer's classes, of writer's magazines, of books on how to write. They give me centipede trouble - you know the yarn about the centipede who was asked how he managed all his feet? He tried to answer, stopped to think about it, and was never able to walk another step.
Robert A. Heinlein
#62. This is the harsh truth about us: not only do Filipinos ignore books, literature - we do not understand how important the arts are - not just to those of us who work at it, but to the nation as a whole.
F. Sionil Jose
#63. I think many of my books, including 'Handle with Care,' including 'My Sister's Keeper,' circle back to how far are we willing to go for the people we love? I think love changes the way we think. It's the thing that takes you out of what your normal set of beliefs would be.
Jodi Picoult
#64. When she thinks a book is very good, what she says to herself is: yes, that's how things are. I hadn't thought of it before, but that's how things are.
Ellen Douglas
#65. How soon could you be ready to go?"
She tilted her head, and her smile turned into a grin. "Is fifteen minutes soon enough?"
"Really. Fifteen minutes." His gold eyes narrowed suddenly. "Those books. That conversation. You little Machiavellian, you set me up.
Thea Harrison
#66. A girl he loved had decided she did not love him
at least, not enough. How was such a problem usually addressed? Surely not with the clandestine exchange of books and computer surveillance and recourse to the jinn.
G. Willow Wilson
#67. Before you can become a writer, you have to be a reader, and a reader of everything, at that. To the best of my recollection, I became a reader at the age of 10 and have never stopped. Like many authors, I read all sorts of books all the time, and it is amazing how the mind fills up.
Terry Pratchett
#68. Since the choice of what we curl up with is often crucial for our solace and sanity, we need to learn how to nurture the talent of selection. Book browsing is a meditative art ... Books are as essential as breathing.
Sarah Ban Breathnach
#69. It doesn't matter how long we've used something; all that matters is how awesome the thing replacing it is. MP3s and automobiles happen to be really, really awesome, whereas ebooks - at least so far - are fairly limited in their awesomeness.
John Green
#70. I don't know exactly how long the book as we know it will exist, but I fully expect to make it to my death without having to give up on books.
Rick Moody
#71. ...I used to think if you read enough books you'd automatically know how to do everything the right way. But reading and doing are not the same at all.
Judy Blume
#72. I don't actually talk about my books much, because I find if I talk about them I don't want to write them anymore. I write to find out what happens. You know how you read a book? That's what I'm doing except I'm just doing it a lot slower because it takes a lot longer to do.
Charles De Lint
#73. The books are like children in that having written one doesn't make writing the next one any easier, because it's a new set of problems and a new set of challenges with each one, and having dealt with one before means that you now know how to do it.
Dara Horn
#74. We are liable to miss the best of life if we do not know how to tingle, if we do not learn to hoist ourselves just a little higher than we generally are in order to sample the rarest and ripest fruit of art which human thought has to offer.
Vladimir Nabokov
#75. That is how we writers all started: by reading. We heard the voice of a book speaking to us.
Margaret Atwood
#76. 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
#77. An editor is someone who is paid to tell a writer what she thinks about how he wrote what he thinks about.
Mokokoma Mokhonoana
#78. Whatever emotional state you're in while you're parenting conveys more to your child than the content of what you're doing with them, no matter how perfect your intervention looks "on paper." In other words, to paraphrase Marshall McLuhan, "your emotional state is the message.
Michael Y. Simon
#79. How do you even start a book you know is going to be your last?
Scott Stambach
#80. The Internal Revenue Service wants a record of how you spend your money, but that is nothing compared to the books God is keeping.
Billy Graham
#81. How mean to buy only as many books as one will actually have time to read.
Alain De Botton
#82. There are movies I've seen or books I've read that attach themselves in a way that's greater than the ability to understand why. How do you explain that kind of connectedness?
Peter Riegert
#83. Everyone has their definition of love. There have been countless songs sung about it. A gazillion books, articles, and poems written about it. There are experts on love who will tell you how to get it, keep it, and get over it.
Alison G. Bailey
#84. It didn't occur to me that my books would be widely read at all, and that enabled me to write anything I wanted to. And even once I realized that they were being read, I still wrote as if I were writing in secret. That's how one has to write anyway
in secret.
Louise Erdrich
#85. Over the years I have collected so many books that, in aggregate, they can fairly be called a library.I don't know what percentage of them I have read. Increasingly I wonder how many of them I ever will read. This has done nothing to dampen my pleasure in acquiring more books.
Marilynne Robinson
#86. Books to the ceiling, Books to the sky, My pile of books is a mile high. How I love them! How I need them! I'll have a long beard by the time I read them.
Arnold Lobel
#87. I keep three kinds of books: those I want to read, those I want to reread, and those I want to reopen just to confirm how bad they are.
Sarah Manguso
#88. If people say they just love the smell of books, I always want to pull them aside and ask; To be clear, do you know how reading works?
Unknown
#89. People say to me so often, 'Jane how can you be so peaceful when everywhere around you people want books signed, people are asking these questions and yet you seem peaceful,' and I always answer that it is the peace of the forest that I carry inside.
Jane Goodall
#90. How many books there are whose reputation is made that would not obtain it were it now to make?
Joseph Joubert
#91. I asked of the limitless sunshine
How to shine with the dawn's glowing light;
No answer came back from the sunshine,
But my soul heard a whisper, "Burn bright!
K. Balmont
#92. That's how it is with books, isn't it: They're not in a hurry. They'll wait for you till you're ready. People empty me. I have to go away to refill.
Charles Bukowski
#93. People can't read a book if they don't know it exists. All authors need to do marketing, regardless of how they published.
Jo Linsdell
#94. Without his books, Thomas Jefferson could not have been Thomas Jefferson. For someone like him living on a frontier, remote from actual experience, books were vital guides to how life might be lived, and none gave him greater inspiration, satisfaction,
Bill Bryson
#95. I was very naive, and I thought it was just a matter of writing my first book and sending it in, and for the rest of my life I would be writing books and collecting royalties. Nobody told me how hard it was going to be to get published.
Jerry Spinelli
#96. I have a very positive outlook on things. It's hard to predict how actual books are going to do but I'm not freaked out about ebooks taking over. I think there are probably more active readers now because of computers and iPhones.
Kevin Sampsell
#97. Okay, so it's like each of these books is a mystery. Every book is a mystery. And if you read all of the books ever written, it's like you've read one giant mystery. And no matter how much you learn, you keep on learning so much more you need to learn.
Sherman Alexie
#99. If we were to understand how important it is to say something and say it well, maybe we wouldn't write a single word, but that would be tragic.
Dejan Stojanovic
#100. [W]hat I like best is staying home and reading. Being rich is not about how many homes you own. It's the freedom to pick up any book you want without looking at the price and wondering whether you can afford it.
John Waters
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