Top 100 Making Books Quotes
#1. I cannot think of any work that could be more agreeable and fun than making books for children.
Arnold Lobel
#2. I wouldn't necessarily have been making books about how to make comics if I'd really felt I knew how to make comics.
Scott McCloud
#4. Making books is a very specific kind of activity. It's not really a collection of your best pictures - although it is - but it's also a way of presenting your work so that it's not repetitive, so that it flows, and so that it makes sense in a book.
Elliott Erwitt
#5. I like making books but I'm not sure exactly what I'm doing. Perhaps I just try to arrange a bunch of seemingly random drawings into something that makes a vague narrative sense. Sometimes it sort of makes sense, sometimes it doesn't.
David Shrigley
#6. Each one seems to be, in some way, essentially different from the others, and each is a surprise to me. I think that making books, or any kind of art, might also be like mining. The artist digs into his or her life and imagination and never knows what they'll find. That's the adventure.
Mordicai Gerstein
#7. Making books has always felt very connected to my bookselling experience, that of wanting to draw people's attention to things that I liked, to shape things that I liked into new shapes.
Jonathan Lethem
#8. Want to get your kids to read more? Try making books easily accessible. Put them where kids can easily reach and don't make them off limits. (within reason)
Melanie Kirk
#9. Making books is hard work. Some books are, of course, more demanding than others.
David Macaulay
#10. The computer is the way I'm making books, but I still think about the physical properties. I visualize the length of a book, the proportions of a book, in material terms.
Jonathan Lethem
#11. I love making books for children. Big kids, little kids, old kids and new.
Tony DiTerlizzi
#12. I became interested in making books, starting about 1965, when I did the Serial Project #1, deciding that I needed a small book to show how the work could be understood and how the system worked.
Sol LeWitt
#13. Paul [ Burwell] and I had also got interested in making books. We'd been working with Bob Cobbing, the sound poet, since the beginning of the 70s, and Bob had this press called Writers Forum.
David Toop
#15. When you're younger and you see something that really speaks to you, it's indelible in a way that's not the same as when you're an adult. So I'll always love reading books and making movies that resonate with young people.
Nina Jacobson
#16. So the books have a greater appeal to a British audience, but that hasn't stopped them making best-seller lists in places like Brazil, Japan and at least a dozen other countries.
Bernard Cornwell
#17. If aught can teach us aught, Affliction's looks,
Making us pry into ourselves so, near,
Teach us to know ourselves, beyond all books,
Or all the learned schools that ever were.
Sir John Davies
#18. Of making many books there is no end, and much study wearies the body
Ecclesiastes 12 12
#19. I've learned to look like I'm listening to long confusing plots of cartoons and comic books when I'm actually sound asleep or making grocery shopping lists in my head.
Patricia Heaton
#20. The first purpose of a librarian is to preserve and defend our books. Sometimes, that means dying for them - or making someone else die for them. Tota est scientia.
Rachel Caine
#21. Books are something social - a writer speaking to a reader - so I think making the reading of a book the center of a social event, the meeting of a book club, is a brilliant idea.
Yann Martel
#22. I don't know if the books are making the world a much better place. I don't write with that objective. What I know is that I see my readers creating a critical mass so we can at least understand this world in a different way.
Paulo Coelho
#23. When you realize that your history books and your science books and your literature books are not the result of experts sitting down and making it a wise decision, but of political pressure groups coming to the state textbook hearings, this is wrong.
Diane Ravitch
#24. There was a long stint during my childhood after I gave up on being a pro football player - we're talking sixth grade here - that I strongly considered a future writing and drawing comic books. I have been making stuff up ever since.
Adam Ross
#25. Worst of all, the inner vault is guarded by a live dragon, attended by fifty naked women armed with poisoned spears, each of them sworn to die in Requin's service. All redheads.
-You're just making that up, Jean.
Scott Lynch
#26. Agent was lying flushed and insensible; the other, bent over his books, was making correct entries of perfectly correct transactions;
Joseph Conrad
#27. For a moment, he rested his hand on the pitchfork, breath ragged. Strands of hair escaped the ponytail and fell over his eyes, making him look wild, untamed. He'd changed so much from that quiet boy. He'd had to, growing up with monsters as playmates.
Megan Shepherd
#28. 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
#29. Everybody who reasons carefully about anything is making a contribution ... and if you abstract it away and send it to the Department of Mathematics they put it in books.
Richard P. Feynman
#30. Of course we all know people who aren't cut out for college, but I know it's a mistake to think of education only as a route to a better career. Reading books, studying history - all these things contribute to making us better citizens, too.
Rebecca Mead
#31. With the '39 Clues,' we were making history jump out of the page for the readers, so they don't know they're learning. The kids can't put the books down - it's so exciting.
Peter Lerangis
#32. Since I spend such a long time making each book, I only choose books that I'm really interested in and that I really love.
Brian Selznick
#33. I know that books seem like the ultimate thing that's made by one person, but that's not true. Every reading of a book is a collaboration between the reader and the writer who are making the story up together.
John Green
#34. This country has such little sense of itself sometimes, I'm astonished. America is one of the biggest myth-making countries, whether we're talking about how many books are published, how many movies we make. But the greatest myth of all is what America is.
Junot Diaz
#35. I live making comics. Comics is an industrial art but less suffering, because comics are for young people who are more adventurous. I do that. I live off comics, and then I write books, but when you want movies, you cannot make movies without money.
Alejandro Jodorowsky
#36. The folks who read my books are so passionate about each one of them that the people making my movies are more afraid of my readership than they are of me.
Chuck Palahniuk
#37. 'Books had always been my best friends and all I wanted to do was lose myself in them, and better yet if the worlds and characters were of my own making.'
Fae Sutherland
#38. I got into writing because books and stories were always a big part of my life. I loved listening to them and then reading them, and I loved making them up.
Nick Earls
#39. Maybe the books can get us half out of the cave. They just might stop us from making the same damm insane mistakes!
Ray Bradbury
#40. Ole Golly: You know what? You're an individual, and that makes people nervous. And it's gonna keep making people nervous for the rest of your life.
Louise Fitzhugh
#41. I was always working. Maybe you weren't aware of the movies I was making, or the television I was doing, or the shows I was creating, or the books I was writing; there have been thirty. But I have always been solidly at work, running as fast as I can.
William Shatner
#43. The thing about Shakespeare is you can only read his books if someone is making you.
Gabrielle Zevin
#44. I wanted the feel in these books to be like an epic fantasy, with kings, queens, dukes and court politics, but of course like what I was explaining before, about making the science make sense, you have to make the politics make sense, too.
Kevin J. Anderson
#45. My first novel was turned down by half a dozen publishers. And even after having published five or six books, I wasn't making enough money to live on, and was beginning to think I'd have to give up the dream of being a full-time writer.
Ian Rankin
#46. In art school, I started to see Pettibon in magazines, and I figured it out backward. I was into the idea that someone could show work in galleries while making album covers and photocopied books.
Michael Dumontier
#47. Fiction is risky for writers also in that the process of making certain books, of shaping certain narratives, leaves scars and marks on your inner life.
Chris Abani
#48. I'm from Ohio, and I wasn't one of those kids who grew up making movies or whatever, but I always wanted to write. I was probably in high school when I realized the things I was writing weren't books; they were movies, they were visual.
David Leslie Johnson
#49. It was a basic plot in any number of her books: girl strikes out, makes good, finds love, gets revenge. In that order. The making good and striking out part I liked. The rest would just be bonus.
Sarah Dessen
#50. When you grow up to be an author and write books, you'll think you're making the books up, but they'll all really be true, somewhere.
Diana Wynne Jones
#51. I can see why you like it here," he said,making a sweeping gesture that encompassed Kyle's collection of movie posters and science fiction books. "There's a thin layer of nerd all over everything." said Jace.
"Thanks. I appreciate that." Simon gave Jace a hard look.
Cassandra Clare
#52. The multitude of books is making us ignorant.
Voltaire
#53. Making mountains out of molehills sells more books than a study of molehills.
Cliff Asness
#54. Sometimes you only get one chance to rewrite the qualities of the character you played in a person's life story. Always take it. Never let the world read the wrong version of you.
Shannon L. Alder
#55. Do you speak perfectly in your native language? No, and you don't blame yourself for making mistakes in your native tongue. So why feel bad when you make mistakes while speaking a foreign language?
Rocket Learning Books
#56. In the painting I saw, in the books I read, I recalled her, for she her had in many ways been the making of me.
Vikram Seth
#57. Winning and making history is something you can't buy. Me? I'm a guy who loves history. When I'm 60 or 70, I don't want to be remembered for the money I make. I want to be in the history books.
LaMarr Woodley
#58. I've had nine of my books adapted to film, and almost all were enjoyable. I've been very lucky with Hollywood, and look forward to more movies being adapted. But I don't get involved in that process. I know nothing about making movies and I stay away from it and hope for the best.
John Grisham
#59. I'm far more often annoyed than delighted by previous readers' marks in used books, so I assume that my notations will be equally annoying to future readers, and avoid making them.
J. Robert Lennon
#60. The moment your kid's born you realize no one knows anything. No one goes to classes. You just have a kid. You can read all the books you like, but unfortunately none of our kids have read the books so they don't care. You're basically making it up as you go along.
Hugh Jackman
#61. We can _start_ making Christmas and Santa can finish up.
Toni Buzzeo
#62. I'm just having fun making jokes and writing books. But you see me once a year, I come on when I have a new book out, but basically, I've got my nose to the grindstone and I'm doing what I'm supposed to do in life, which is make stories.
T.C. Boyle
#63. The problem with making movies is that you have to devote so much of your life to fawning and flattering the men in suits, whereas that doesn't happen in books. You just go and write, and then the book comes out.
Richard Flanagan
#64. As long as they're making beloved books into movies, people are going to be like, 'That's not my mental image of them.' It takes that moment for it to click and become their mental image.
Cassandra Clare
#65. Looking back, I realize my favorite stories weren't in books, they were in comics. On top of being a history enthusiast, my father was also a comics fan, and he kept his stash in the top drawer of his dresser, in easy reach of a kid making a beeline to the bathroom.
Jeff Kinney
#66. Dad always explained the car engine when he repaired it, and he had many technical books, so I was making electromagnets by age eight as well as reading my mother's medical and nursing books. I suspect I was born with a boundless curiosity, and this was encouraged through my childhood.
Barry Marshall
#67. I keep writing children's books, I keep making children's books, because I still have them inside of me.
Oliver Jeffers
#68. As a former English major, I am a sitting duck for Gift Books, and in the past few years I've gotten Dickens, Thackeray, Smollet, Richardson, Emerson, Keats, Boswell and the Brontes, all of them Great, none of them ever read by me, all of them now on a shelf, looking at me and making me feel guilty.
Garrison Keillor
#69. Unlike life, when books become meaningless, they are making a point.
Mason Cooley
#70. The technology that threatens to kill off books as we know them - the 'physical book,' a new phrase in our language - is also making the physical book capable of being more beautiful than books have been since the middle ages.
Art Spiegelman
#71. As far back as I remember, long before I could write, I had played at making stories. But not until I was seven or more, did I begin to pray every night, "O God, let me write books! Please, God, let me write books!"
Ellen Glasgow
#72. It's like before the Breakdown people used to spend their whole lives making cocoons for themselves out of furniture and ornaments and books and toys and pictures and any kind of shit they could find. As though they hoped they'd be born out of the cocoon as something else.
M.R. Carey
#73. Get up and make notes on the books that you have, reflect on these notes and order more books, get up again, revise the hypothesis, and figure out a new plan of action. Repeat, making sure to leave no cracks open through which the gray fog of depression can penetrate. I
Barbara Ehrenreich
#74. Anyway, in the mid 80's I was spending a fortune buying old Golden Age books from the late 30's and 40's and I was making personal appearances at a lot of sci fi and comic book conventions all around the country here so that I could find books for my collection.
Bill Mumy
#75. By making the place and the people and the feelings real, by the time someone closes the cover of one of my books, they have, hopefully, felt all of the emotions of life.
Nicholas Sparks
#76. Books have a publishing standard, and every Indie Author is responsible to their readers in making sure those standards are met or exceeded.
Eeva Lancaster
#77. When couples start to get stale, instead of looking to books or movies or other people for their support or romance, they should be coming to each other, ramping things up, making things fun.
Shelly Crane
#78. Self-help books are making life downright unsafe. Women desperate to catch a man practice all the ploys recommended by these authors. Bump into him, trip over him, knock him down, spill something on him, scald him, but meet him.
Florence King
#79. If I don't sell any copies of my books/apps or if I sell a million copies, I'm still going to continue making them. I create because I'm passionate about the craft, making money was never the motivation.
Greg Pugh
#80. That's another argument for writing: making something that outlasts you.
Zia Haider Rahman
#81. The problem with reading off a screen isn't resolution, eyestrain, or compatibility with reading in the bathtub: it's that computers are seductive, they tempt us to do other things, making concentrating on a long-form work impractical.
Cory Doctorow
#82. Who is my role model and how long can I keep this going? I just move around and do different things and come back to music, try making films and come back to music, write children's books and come back to music.
Madonna Ciccone
#83. Winny didn't know what he would do without his books, except probably go berserk and start killing people and making ashtrays out of their skulls even though he didn't smoke and never would.
Dean Koontz
#84. My regular life today is reading books, making dolls houses, sewing dolls with my daughter and barbequing.
Milla Jovovich
#85. We are all products of our environment; every person we meet, every new experience or adventure, every book we read, touches and changes us, making us the unique being we are.
C.J. Heck
#86. Just get him started on what he thinks is best for souls. He's all about making everyone feel right at home. Oh gods! He reads these stupid psychology books and just spouts off random psycho-babble. It's awful! - Cassandra
Kaitlin Bevis
#87. It stinks of trains and that chili with the chocolate in it. Ooooh, books! he exclaimed suddenly, making a beeline for the small library. (Al)
Kim Harrison
#88. I'm not into fame. I'm not into making money, outside of financing my books. I'm not into status. My thing is basically about time - not wasting it.
Henry Rollins
#89. I'm a girl from Sweden. I took a lot of risks and went to New York by myself when I was 19 just because I read about it in a few books. I came here knowing nobody, having no money, and now I'm doing all these things like making records and videos every day.
Lykke Li
#90. My attempt has been really to, beyond making a record of contemporary life, which is what you inevitably do, is trying to make beautiful books - books that are in some way beautiful, that are models of how to use the language, models of honest feeling, models of care.
John Updike
#91. In movies, books & even music, to me, the true artist is the writer. Writers have to begin the creative process by making nothing into something before it can ever manifest into anything.
Chris Mentillo
#92. In these books, there were spells and rituals for making a living soul something hungry and desperate like him, but he didn't find likelihood in any of them. All it told him was that man was terrified of nothing so much as death. Having died, he could think of dozens of things more worth his fear.
Thomm Quackenbush
#93. I would rather read a mediocre book than waste time sitting around with people making small talk.
James D. Sass
#94. I was raised among books, making invisible friends in pages that seemed cast from dust and whose smell I carry on my hands to this day.
Carlos Ruiz Zafon
#95. Today, we see some "file sharing" sites that rely on fans uploading cracked copies of ebooks, and which then make money off those books by charging for downloads (via cash subscriptions or advertising). Again: I take a dim view of this. They're making money off the back of my work without paying me.
Charles Stross
#96. Some people are happy when they are at the sea; I'm happy when I'm standing in front of a shelf of books. It feels like the known place and also the beginning of a new adventure. It has that simultaneous paradoxical effect of making me feel absolutely calm and very excited.
Jeanette Winterson
#97. London has the trick of making its past, its long indelible past, always a part of its present. And for that reason it will always have meaning for the future, because of all it can teach about disaster, survival, and redemption. It is all there in the streets. It is all there in the books.
Anna Quindlen
#98. I will spend my life traveling, laughing, drinking all kinds of tea, meeting new people, reading good books, growing things, creating beauty, eating chocolate, doing magic, making love and occasionally I will write something worth reading.
Brooke Hampton
#99. I really enjoy making sure the kids get a healthy dinner, a good bath and several books ... I really like to try and end the day with some quality time with my kids. If not, I feel guilty.
Norah O'Donnell
#100. Live life and write about life. Of the making of many books there is indeed no end, but there are more than enough books about books.
Will Self
