It Book Quotes

#1. That would have been the end of it, book Z in the series, nothing left to do but mourn, or curse her into the afterlife.

Lia Habel

#2. In a time when, as Woodson puts it, 'book sales trump the quality of ideas...

Joseph A. Tainter

#3. As much as we don't want to hear it, book marketing is a huge part of becoming a successful author.

Heather Hart

#4. Comic book fans have loved Wolverine, and all the 'X-Men' characters, for more than the action. I think that's what set it apart from many of the other comic books. In the case of Wolverine, when he appeared, he was a revolution really. He was the first anti-hero.

Hugh Jackman

#5. I am completing a book I began back in 2002 called 'Poems in the Manner of.' 'The Matador of Metaphor' is from this manuscript. It is an homage to Wallace Stevens that appropriates certain of his techniques.

David Lehman

#6. In the Book of Benamii, we have all read that it's better for one person in power to die, if their rule is unjust, than an entire nation to forget the God who made them.

Michelle Erickson

#7. I have read only the first 'Harry Potter' book. I thought it excellent, perhaps the best thing written for older children since The Hobbit. I wish the books had been around when my kids were the right age for them.

Gene Wolfe

#8. Can I ask what you're reading?" ... She turned the book so the cover faced me. Wuthering Heights. "Have you read it?" She said. I nodded. I could feel the pulsating beat of my heart behind my eyes. "It's a sad story." "Sad stories make good books," She said. "They do.

Khaled Hosseini

#9. 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

#10. When her mind was discomposed ... a book was the opiate that lulled it to repose.

Ann Radcliffe

#11. A classic is a book that survives the circumstances that made it possible yet alone keeps those circumstances alive.

Alfred Kazin

#12. The thing is, what I'm tryin' to say is -
they do get on a lot better without me, I can't help them any. They ain't mean. They buy me everything I want, but it's now - you've-got-it-go-play-with-it. You've got a roomful of things. I-got-you-that-book-so-go-read-it.

Harper Lee

#13. The book of Isaiah is a tract for our own times; our very aversion to it testifies to its relevance.

Hugh Nibley

#14. I hate it when I have to wait the next book in a series to come out.
Don't you hate it when you have to wait for the next book in a series to come out?

Patrick Rothfuss

#15. A quotation in a speech, article or book is like a rifle in the hands of an infantryman. It speaks with authority.

Brendan Behan

#16. A lot of poets too live on the margins of social acceptance, they certainly aren't in it for the money. William Blake - only his first book was legitimately published.

Jim Jarmusch

#17. 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

#18. I know some people see it as this success when the book is finally made into a movie - that marks its success. I don't see it that way.

Robin Hobb

#19. There is one "right answer" to any question, and it is in the book to be read.

Joseph Barrell

#20. There was something about a book that inspired dedication and a swelling desire to possess it.

Kate Morton

#21. It seemed impossible that a scrappy book like 'Goon Squad' could win an award like that. It's such an iconic honor. I think what the Pulitzer means to me is that I'll need to work very, very hard to try to live up to it.

Jennifer Egan

#22. The telephone book is full of facts, but it doesn't contain a single idea.

Mortimer Adler

#23. I am a gypsy, Mahgen. What that means is that sometimes I do shit. On purpose. Shit, that pisses people off. And I like it. A lot.
-Madison Thorne Grey, Sustenance

Madison Thorne Grey

#24. My first novel, 'The Lions of Lucerne,' just poured out of me. It was an amazing feeling of accomplishment. My biggest fear and therefore my biggest obstacle to becoming an author had been, 'What if I spend all that time and the book is no good?'

Brad Thor

#25. Reasonable readers would have accepted my book about ghouls as a work of fiction, but such readers are rare, and most condemned it as a hoax. Even worse, totally unreasonable readers took it for a scientific treatise.

H.P. Lovecraft

#26. I have a screened in porch, and it's nice to curl up with a book outside when it's raining, especially an old battered classic like 'Pride & Prejudice & Zombies.'

Amanda Hocking

#27. Newland never seems to look ahead,' Mrs. Welland once ventured to complain to her daughter; and May answered serenely:
'No; but you see it doesn't matter, because when there's nothing particular to do he reads a book.

Edith Wharton

#28. I am no fan of books. And chances are, if you're reading this, you and I share a healthy skepticism about the printed word. Well, I want you to know that this is the first book I've ever written, and I hope it's the first book you've ever read. Don't make a habit of it.

Stephen Colbert

#29. It is my ambition to say in ten sentences what others say in a whole book.

Friedrich Nietzsche

#30. Eventually someone will find out the truth. It could be you.

Criag Whitman

#31. 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

#32. Every book should begin with attractive endpapers. Preferably in a dark colour: dark red or dark blue, depending on the binding. When you open the book it's like going to the theatre. First you see the curtain. Then it's pulled aside and the show begins.

Cornelia Funke

#33. It takes all my strength to do daily tasks. To some people, I'm just a number. I'm a projected food stamps debit card lifetime member. I'm seen as crazy or insane, but it doesn't matter. I know I am bigger than my suffering.

Jacquelyn Nicole Davis

#34. Did you ever read the Bible? I mean sit down and read it like it was a book? Check out Lamentations. That's where we're at, pretty much. Pretty much lamenting. Pretty much pouring our hearts out like water.

Peter Heller

#35. I wrote a book. It sucked. I wrote nine more books. They sucked, too. Meanwhile, I read every single thing I could find on publishing and writing, went to conferences, joined professional organizations, hooked up with fellow writers in critique groups, and didn't give up. Then I wrote one more book.

Beth Revis

#36. Governments don't protect people, people protect governments."
"Order is organic, it can't just be ordered up."
"The more complexity, the more unpredictability and therefore the more uncontrollability. You cannot control what you cannot predict.

Lawrence Samuels

#37. Once you've written a book, it belongs to everyone, and they are all allowed to have opinions, and the spectrum of opinions is the spectrum of humanity.

Neil Gaiman

#38. When you read a book, the neurons in your brain fire overtime, deciding what the characters are wearing, how they're standing, and what it feels like the first time they kiss. No one shows you. The words make suggestions. Your brain paints the pictures.

Meg Rosoff

#39. this book itself is not a book on what people at the top do or should do. It is addressed to everyone who, as a knowledge worker, is responsible for actions and decisions which are meant to contribute to the performance capacity of his organization.

Peter F. Drucker

#40. Does it matter that people and things
Have words,
Have names?
If not,
Why read any book?
A litany of useless letters
Detached from bone, muscle.
Or are words the only things that make the muscle, bone, memory, movement,
Person
Real?

Stasia Ward Kehoe

#41. 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

#42. I said from the start I had to be trustful of the Millennium universe. It was not going to be a Stieg Larsson book, but my interpretation of his iconic characters and universe.

David Lagercrantz

#43. TV's not the problem, and I'm tired of it being posed as this antithesis to creativity and productivity. If TV's getting in your way of writing a book, then you don't want to write a book bad enough.

Andrea Seigel

#44. And I offer this book with the heartiest sentiments to all the jolly people who hate what I write, and regard it (very justly, for all I know), as a piece of poor clowning or a single tiresome joke.

G.K. Chesterton

#45. 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

#46. I may have a general broad-based idea of what I want to write about when I sit down to write a book, but I don't have any idea of what it's going to say. I would call my experience of creativity 'inspired by God' to produce certain pieces of information that might be useful to others.

Neale Donald Walsch

#47. What fools the public were! They were exactly like sheep ... thought Mr. Abbott sleepily ... following each other's lead, neglecting one book and buying another just because other people were buying it, although, for the life of you, you couldn't see what the one lacked and the other possessed.

D.E. Stevenson

#48. I'm very much to blame for not seeing it before, but who on earth goes about suspecting an impossible outlandish thing like murder? That's something that happens in books, not among people you know.

Mary Stewart

#49. There's a point I set for myself, and it's an arbitrary point, when I think no matter happens, I'm going to finish that book. And that's when I get to page 100. I have to see it out.

Joanna Scott

#50. The character's flaw will shape every other aspect of your book. The flaw is the engine that drives your entire book, from hooking your reader's interest to propelling the plot to its climax - so choose your flaw with care, and make it count.

Libbie Hawker

#51. 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

#52. It's like reading a good book. The kind where you don't want to skip pages to see what happens at the end. Each moment is a story in itself.

Renee Carlino

#53. A wonderful book ... Full of sadness, hope, and ultimately love. I found it very moving.

Esther Freud

#54. It only takes one minute to find a really good book, but it can give you a lifetime of memories when you read a really good book that leaves you with lasting impression.

Nahisha McCoy

#55. I started my Twitter account for selfish reasons: I wanted to have a place to post updates on my book signing tour and stuff like that. I never realized that I'd have so much fun tweeting. It's become the deleted scenes for my DVD of columns and podcasts.

Bill Simmons

#56. Some cleric putting a match to her. /Neither of them looks happy about it. /Once lit, she'll burn like a book, /like a book that was ever finished, /like a locked-up library.

Margaret Atwood

#57. Sally was on the first floor reading a book, one that she normally wouldn't read, and she felt quite guilty. Twilight. She knew the series was ridiculous but everyone was going crazy over the books and the movies. She'd finally given in and decided that it wouldn't hurt to just read a little bit.

Anjela Renee

#58. I do think students in public school (and private) should be required to study the Bible. As a matter of pure education, it's shocking that we [the americans] are not compelled to learn the book, which is the source of our language, our common stories, our political structure, our conflicts.

David Plotz

#59. I once wrote deduceable instead of deducible in a book, though nobody then or since has taken me up on it. A small point as they go, perhaps, but Rule I of writing acceptably is to get everything right as far as you can, and in this case I had neglected to.

Kingsley Amis

#60. 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

#61. I guess if I wrote a book one day, it would be about hair.

Julia Louis-Dreyfus

#62. It holds my essential stuff, including a book - for true contentment, one must carry a book at all times, and great books so rarely fit, my friends, into one's pocket[ ... ]

Michael Chabon

#63. When I'm writing a book, I don't have any responsibility to anyone. I'm solitary. I'm writing on my own. I write by hand. And I write every day. I mean, it's part of my daily discipline.

Patti Smith

#64. What makes a book memorable is the message it etched in the readers' minds.

Tista Ray

#65. 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

#66. This isn't a religious book though I mention God, not a medical advisory though I speak of pain. It's a circus, a mortuary, a grade school, a limousine ride. Will it be worth the paper it's printed on or the screen you hold in your hand? I just hope you remember it next week.

Chila Woychik

#67. If I have not read a book before, it is, for all intents and purposes, new to me whether it was printed yesterday or three hundred years ago.

William Hazlitt

#68. If you were at school they would not let you read a book like this, they would keep you from reading it by involving you in sport.

Helen DeWitt

#69. Relationships are like a book,
It takes few seconds to burn,
But
It takes years to write,
So write it carefully
And
Never let it burn

Aditya Nighot

#70. I began thinking there should be an American phrase book, 'cause I've got an Italian phrase book, and an Arabic one ... now a British one. I think it'd be pretty good to have an American phrase book.

Joe Strummer

#71. Make it a rule never to give a child a book you would not read yourself.

George Bernard Shaw

#72. It's too hard to explain. I can't say why I love the book. I just do. You don't pick the books you fall in love with any more than you pick the people you fall in love with. It just happens, and when it happens, you know. Who's to say where love comes from?

Sarah Combs

#73. The book is worth reading, in part because it is enjoyable to read of
other people's folly, not to mention their avarice and stupidity."
Roger Lowenstein, reviewing "Devil Take the Hindmost: a History
of Financial Speculation", WSJ 6-1-99

Roger Lowenstein

#74. This is not a book about Australia. No, it's about somewhere entirely different which happens to be, here and there, a bit ... Australian. Still ... no worries, right?

Terry Pratchett

#75. Like many self-help books, The Deepest Blue is full of horrifyingly simplistic language and some admittedly good advice. Somehow the women in the book learn to say: That's my depression talking. It's not "me."
As if we could scrape the color off the iris and still see.

Maggie Nelson

#76. The time comes in life when we have read enough. It's time to stop reading. It's time to lay down the books and write.

Albert Einstein

#77. I'd forced books on my kids from the day they were born and, as it turned out, it had been completely unnecessary because all of them liked to read. Or maybe they liked to read because I'd read aloud nearly every children's book in print.

Jeff Shelby

#78. Gone was the insignificant, defective girl. I was some kind of f**king comic book vigilante & it felt amazing!

Ripley Patton

#79. 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

#80. '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

#81. People are interested in writing, and often there's an unjustifiable sense of people to believe my talking to them for the book is going to accord them any sort of fame. Which it won't. At the same time, they can be more circumspect if they know they're on the record.

Jesse Kellerman

#82. When anything goes digital, let alone something as immaterial as a book, there is a tendency to see it as just in the air to be taken, and to lose the sense that somebody once made it.

Graham Swift

#83. 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

#84. Possibly the strangest book ever made, the 'Codex Seraphinianus' is an encyclopedia of an imaginary world, with illegible calligraphy - it is written in an alphabet no one can understand - and surreal drawings of odd beasts and machines.

Russell Smith

#85. I don't like drawing characters facing right. If I tried to do that at a book signing, I'd have to pencil it first.

Stephan Pastis

#86. If there was anything at all in the Book, anything of hope and peace for His blind and bewildered spawn which He had chosen above all others to offer immortality, THOU SHALT NOT KILL must be it ...

William Faulkner

#87. 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

#88. I like it when someone gives me a new book of poetry by a poet I haven't read.

Nell Freudenberger

#89. The control of your mind is most important, and it will be worth your while. You must think deeply. Clear your mind of all bad, unwanted thoughts

William O'Brien

#90. In an ancient and dead language, any recognition of living nature attracts us. These are such sentences as were written while grass grew and water ran. It is no small recommendation when a book will stand the test of mere unobstructed sunshine and daylight.

Henry David Thoreau

#91. The earth is God's book but in our blindness, we have obliterated letters so we may say God has abandoned us. It is we who are illiterate.

Erica Jong

#92. I grew it - sorry, drew it - for this book, if for no other reason than to illustrate the old saying that the apple doesn't fall far from the tree.

Connor Franta

#93. Does he not feel the fire between his body and mine? Is that all me? How can it be all me? It feels like a flat sun trapped between us---pressed like a flower between the pages of a thick book, burning the paper." --Melanie

Stephenie Meyer

#94. I certainly wouldn't be writing books if it hadn't been for the feminist blogosphere, and I think that's a really amazing thing.

Jessica Valenti

#95. It was at our library that I found Nancy Drew and fell in love with the genre. I've been grateful ever since for those tolerant, book-loving librarians who allowed a child like me to read what I wanted to read.

Nancy Pickard

#96. 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

#97. As a writer, you're making a pact with the reader; you're saying, 'Look, I know and you know that if this book was really a murder investigation, it would be a thousand pages long and would be very dull, and you would be very unhappy with the ending.'

Mark Billingham

#98. For me, one of the really cool things about this is that throughout these movies, there have been - and I enjoyed it this way - hints at what S.H.I.E.L.D. is and how they function within this Marvel movie universe which, as you know, is deeply based in the comic books.

Clark Gregg

#99. 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

#100. Sad to say, multi-tasking is beyond me. I read one book at a time all the way through. If I'm reviewing the book, I have to write the review before I start reading any other book. I especially hate it when the phone rings and interrupts my train of thought.

Michael Dirda