Top 100 On Books Quotes
#1. I spend a frightening amount of money on books.
Kevin McCloud
#2. There are some people who read too much: the bibliobibuli. I know some who are constantly drunk on books, as other men are drunk on whiskey or religion. They wander through this most diverting and stimulating of worlds in a haze, seeing nothing and hearing nothing.
H.L. Mencken
#3. In some families, parents don't read or don't have the money to spend on books.
Victoria Osteen
#5. I've done a number of things based on real people or true stories or based on books, and I'm a great believer that you have to be true to the script.
Clive Owen
#6. I was a member of Corstorphine Library in Edinburgh, and every Friday night, my parents took me there to borrow books. I also used to spend nearly all my pocket money on books.
Philip Kerr
#7. 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
#8. I have depended on books not only for pleasure and for the wisdom they bring to all who read, but also for that knowledge which comes to others through their eyes and their ears.
Helen Keller
#9. When I was really young, Dad wasn't that well known. I don't remember when I realised he was a writer, but I do remember him leaving his full-time job at the Central Electrical Generating Board to concentrate on books.
Rhianna Pratchett
#10. The entire idea of sin, is based on books of the dead people. It is a sociological invention founded on textual fanaticism.
Abhijit Naskar
#11. I can't contain how enthusiastic I am about working on books for kids.
Peter Lerangis
#12. Count calories if you like, but go ahead and gorge yourself on books. What have you got to lose but a small mind?
Robin R. Meyers
#13. When I'm not writing or working on books as a publisher, I'm doing things that make me happy. One is skiing with my kids and husband. I love sports.
Andrea Davis Pinkney
#14. I think successful movies that are based on books are their own thing. I think if you're too faithful, word by word, character trait to character trait, it can hurt the movie.
Peter Dinklage
#15. I've decided that the out-of-five-stars rating system is kind of stupid and useless and reductive, so I won't be doing that anymore. When I have the time and the inclination, I'll post a comment or two on books I've completed.
Jamie Fitzpatrick
#16. My father was weaned on books. I'm halfway between being weaned on books and weaned on television. And if you're weaned on television, you're not as good a writer as if you were weaned on books.
James Burrows
#17. Education is the process of selling someone on books.
Douglas Wilson
#18. And so we beat on, books against the critics, borne back ceaslessly into rewrites.
F Scott Fitzgerald
#19. I spend money on convenient, comfortable and luxurious things; I spend money on books too.
Amit Kalantri
#20. I find that balancing my life with my work with the kids at St. Jude, working on books, working on my career as an actor and taking time out for my husband and family help to cushion a lot of the blows.
Marlo Thomas
#21. I teethed on books of heroes such as Winston Churchill, Abraham Lincoln and King David.
Luke Ford
#22. There was a time when the world acted on books; now books act on the world.
Joseph Joubert
#23. I know some who are constantly drunk on books as other men are drunk on whiskey.
H.L. Mencken
#24. I have a very low tolerance for boredom and often think I would have missed out on books entirely if I'd grown up in the Internet and video game age. Now I enjoy books for people of all ages, including children.
Rick Yancey
#25. When we got around to books, I was finally set, as our minister would say, on solid ground. I gorged on books. I sneaked them at night. I rubbed their spines and sniffed in the musty smell of them in the library.
Lorene Cary
#27. Asked him and he said he wasn't. Besides, nothin's real scary except on books.
Harper Lee
#28. The soul that feeds on books alone
I count that soul exceeding small
That lives alone by book and creed,
A soul that has not learned to read.
Joaquin Miller
#29. Because we do not sell photographs, we have no royalties on books, posters, postcards.
Christo
#30. Don't you miss it, any of it?'
...
'I couldn't say.' She thought about it. 'Not cars or electric lights, not movies. Books I can get if I ask. But walking around in a library, putting my hands on books I never knew about, that I miss. Any thing else, I don't know.
Barbara Kingsolver
#31. The cheaper books become, the less money is spent on books.
George Orwell
#32. New York establishment isn't really a literary establishment. It's just a collection of broken down old newspaper hacks who pass judgment on books that they have not even read, with assuredness of Jehova.
James Purdy
#33. On books and friends I spend my money;
For stones and bricks I haven't any.
Ruskin Bond
#35. In 1994, the average person spent $79 on books as compared to $56 on recorded music.
Richard L. Brandt
#36. I still had the craving that I had given in to all summer long when I had lived on books, to have the reach to grasp both ends of the frame and turn the big image-taking glass to any scene of the world.
Saul Bellow
#37. Together, we can make ourselves a nation that spends more on books than on bombs, more on hospitals than the terrible tools of war, more on decent houses than military aircraft.
Robert Kennedy
#38. The library was still giving trouble: a few books in some of the more obscure corners of the stacks retained some autonomy, dating back to an infamous early experiment with flying books, and lately they'd begun to breed. Shocked undergraduates had stumbled on books in the very act.
Lev Grossman
#39. I'm a novelist who read a lot as a kid. When you grow up on books and then grow up to write books, famous authors are a lot more meaningful to you than TV and movie stars.
Claire Scovell LaZebnik
#40. Like mold on books, grow myths on history.
Laini Taylor
#41. St Thomas (Aqinas) loved books and lived on books... When asked for what he thanked God most, he answered simply, 'I have understood every page I ever read'.
G.K. Chesterton
#42. I have this belief that children become readers before they can read. They become hooked on books because they were read aloud to as a child.
Jacqueline Wilson
#43. I can't keep a baby," A.J. says firmly. "I haven't slept in two nights. She's a terrorist! She wakes up at, like, insane times. Three forty-five in the morning seems to be when her day begins. I live alone. I'm poor. You can't raise a baby on books alone.
Gabrielle Zevin
#44. A solitary child growing up in Africa, you're really quite dependent on books.
John Rhys-Davies
#45. 'The New 52,' I was really excited that new people got to jump in on books. In particular, on 'Aqua Man.'
Geoff Johns
#46. Sometimes it occurs to me that the job of a serious cultural critic mostly consists in telling the generality of people that their opinions - on films, on books, on all manner of widgets, gadgets and even the latest electronic fidgets - simply aren't up to scratch.
Will Self
#47. Although she was not a great reader, Mma Potokwane was a firm believer in the power of the book. The more books that Botswana had, in her view, the better. It would be on books that the future would be based; books and the people who knew how to use them.
Alexander McCall Smith
#48. I love those adult writers with the pranking ethos, [Don] DeLillo and [Donald] Barthelme and David Foster Wallace. I don't see any reason not to bring those kinds of influences to bear on books for children.
Mac Barnett
#49. If the government ever imposes a tax on books - and I wouldn't put it past them - I'm in dead trouble.
Terry Pratchett
#50. Behold, nothing surpasses books. Would that I might make you love them more than your mother. Would that I might make their beauty enter before your face. For it is greater than any office You are to set your heart on books.
Anonymous
#51. Spend 80 percent of your time on books and 20 percent on articles and newspapers. And by books, I don't mean just any book. I mean hardcovers. A paperback is made to be read. A hardcover is made to be studied. There's a huge difference.
Tim Sanders
#52. Americans spend more on beer than they do on books. No wonder their stomachs are bigger than their brains.
Rick Warren
#53. I don't want anyone writing in to point out that I spend too much money on books, many of which I will never read. I know that already. I certainly intend to read all of them, more or less. My intentions are good. Anyway, it's my money. And I'll bet you do it too.
Nick Hornby
#54. Rip her dress off!" Bob shouted. Bob the Skull takes paperback romances very seriously. The next page turned so quickly that he tore the paper a little. Bob is even harder on books than I am.
"That's what I'm talking about!" Bob hollered, as more pages turned.
Jim Butcher
#55. In adolescence students are suddenly turned loose on books worth reading, but generally don't know how to read them.
Martin Buber
#56. Nobody fights over the opinion of which book is better. So why do we fight over which religion is better, if they're all based on books? Let us read and learn from them all and unite in our differences and disagreements too.
Robin Sacredfire
#57. Worldview" is not based on books; it is an internal form, which at times in a person with little education is expressed much more brightly, than in some other "intellectual" or scientist.
Julius Evola
#58. A dreary censorship, and self-censorship, has been imposed on books by the centralization of the book industry.
Erica Jong
#59. I am a bit of a Cheap Pete, but I do spend a fortune on books and false moustaches and practical jokes.
Karen Duffy
#60. Our instructed vagrancy, which has hardly time to linger by the hedgerows, but runs away early to the tropics, and is at home with palms and banyans - which is nourished on books of travel, and stretches the theatre of its imagination to the Zambesi.
George Eliot
#61. They are not the best students who are most dependent on books. What can be got out of them is at best only material; a man must build his house for himself.
George MacDonald
#62. I am happy to keep working on books because I'm always reading, and I'm always trying to fall in love.
Nina Jacobson
#63. The problem of the librarian is that books are multi-dimensional in their subject matter but must be ordered on one-dimensional shelves.
Neal Stephenson
#64. Learning from books and teachers is like traveling by carriage, so we are told in the Veda. But, the carriage will serve only while one is on the highroad. He who reaches the end of the highroad will leave the carriage and walk afoot.
Johannes Itten
#65. It's amazing how books change. The chapter you're working on today would not have been the same if you wrote it yesterday or tomorrow.
Raymond Bolton
#66. All my books are made up of other books. They're all deeply structured on other fiction, because I was a student in fiction and I didn't have much actual living to draw on. I suspect a lot of other people's novels are like that, too, though they might be slower to talk about it.
Zadie Smith
#67. I was a very observant child. The boys in my books are based on boys in my neighborhood growing up.
Beverly Cleary
#68. I wanted to badly to be vulnerable over a burger, beer, and bags of free books we find on some stranger's porch. You wanted badly to be touched some thousand miles away and never found the time to write me back.
Darnell Lamont Walker
#69. You shouldn't talk about yourself all the time - most of us aren't for sale. Our books are. Talk about them. It's not a question of whether or not you're fascinating on a personal level - it's that your trivia and trials might not have any connection to the tone, tenor and sense of your books.
M.J. Rose
#70. 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
#71. I can't divorce myself from my childhood. I try to write as much fiction as I possibly can, but there are so many things that are touchstones of my childhood like being on the swim team and playing soccer and the particularities of sports season and environments that make their way into my books.
Jeff Kinney
#72. 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
#73. Adventure books are my personal favorites. 'The Endurance,' a story about Ernest Shackleton's legendary Antarctica expedition, or 'Into Thin Air,' Jon Krakauer's personal account of the 1996 disaster on Mt Everest, are two notables.
Dean Karnazes
#74. The last time I glanced at the library books on the kitchen shelf they were more than five months overdue, and I wondered whether I would have chosen differently if I had known that these were the last books, the ones which would stand forever on our kitchen shelf.
Shirley Jackson
#75. 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
#76. 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
#77. I used to think, 'I'm going to write.' I knew that from quite early on, but I also thought, 'Maybe I'll be an explorer or a spy,' and it all came from books.
Lisa Tuttle
#78. To sit down on a chair and read my books with all my friends at school is my right. To see each and every human being with a smile of happiness is my wish. I am Malala. My world has changed but I have not.
Malala Yousafzai
#79. People think I'm selling feminism in my books, but what I'm really doing is writing advertising copy for expensive private colleges that most women can't afford anyway. Oh, and try to find a job with a major in English literature. No luck? Joke's on you, sucker!
Mary Gordon
#80. 'Wild at Heart' created a set of expectations maybe, partly, on my part, certainly on my publisher's part, but also in the world out there, that my next books would be as remarkable.
John Eldredge
#81. Well I've been writing books. So that, by its nature, is kind of a solitary occupation. And from time to time I have research help, but mostly I've done those completely on my own.
Caroline Kennedy
#82. Seeing one's books on the shelf tells you so much about the way somebody has, over the years, put together their private library, which is a reflection of their minds and their selves.
Jeanette Winterson
#83. 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
#84. 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
#85. 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
#86. And one of the reasons that I wrote the cook books was so that I could be at home more than being on the road.
Trisha Yearwood
#87. Usually I decide on what it is I'm writing next by the books I'm reading.
Kate Mosse
#88. I took on a year of reading books for a reason. Because words are witness to life: they record what has happened, and they make it all real. Words create the stories that become history and become unforgettable. Even fiction portrays truth: good fiction is truth.
Nina Sankovitch
#89. You may read any quantity of books, and you may almost as ignorant as you were at starting, if you don't have, at the back of yourminds, the change for words in definite images which can only be acquired through the operation of your observing faculties on the phenomena of nature.
Thomas Huxley
#90. 'Walking the Bible' describes the year that I spent retracing the five books of Moses through the desert, and I was actually working on a follow-up, which would look at the rest of the Hebrew Bible and the New Testament.
Bruce Feiler
#91. I got my iPad, and I'm trying to buy books on that, but I kind of like a book. At the end of my life, when I'm old, I want to have all these shelves full of books. So I'm just gonna do the book thing.
Luke Bryan
#92. The spouses of authors ought to really read their better halves books. What is found amidst those pages may enlighten them to knowing a side of their partner that can only be seen on the written page.
Sai Marie Johnson
#93. 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
#94. I'm not big on reading business books. I get copies of all of them, because people want me to put a comment on the jacket. Every once in a while, I'll get interested and read one all the way through.
James Goodnight
#95. A machine condemned to devour books and then throw them , in a changed form , on the dunghill of history .
Karl Marx
#96. I am a really big Harry Potter fan and I've seen all the sets, I've lived Harry Potter and I don't think it's destroyed the books at all, I think it's really spot on.
Rupert Grint
#98. There are lots of big books that have gay characters - or, more commonly, a gay character - in secondary roles, but seldom are their lives, and especially their sexual lives, on center stage.
Garth Greenwell
#99. I grew up on Stephen King, reading the books. I love the small town, 1950s feel to it, that nostalgia, and that old America. What happens when something weird starts happening to all these people, something other-worldly, something demonic?
Alexander Koch
#100. Ah,' said Zultan. 'I, too. I keep many books at my home.' He gestured to the books in the tent. 'These are only a few. Those I think might need on this trip, and those I have yet to read and might want, and those old friends that I cannot bear to leave behind.
T. Kingfisher
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