Own Book Quotes

#1. Our story opens in the mind of Luther L. (L for LeRoy) Fliegler, who is lying in his bed, not thinking of anything, but just aware of sounds, conscious of his own breathing, and sensitive to his own heartbeats. Lying beside him is his wife, lying on her right side and enjoying her sleep.

John O'Hara

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

Hugh Nibley

#3. We love books because they are the greatest escape. That is because our own minds eye is the purest form of virtual reality.

M.R. Mathias

#4. I cannot think of a greater blessing than to die in one's own bed, without warning or discomfort, on the last page of a new book that we most wanted to read.

John Russell, 1st Earl Russell

#5. One book, printed in the Heart's own wax / Is worth a thousand in the stack's

Jan Luyken

#6. I started on the opening page of my own book.
'I am a cheating, weak-spined, women-fearing coward, and i am the hero of your story. Because the woman I cheated on - my wife, Amy Elliott Dunne - is a sociopath and a murderer.'
Yes. I'd read that.

Gillian Flynn

#7. 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

#8. I do not believe writers should read reviews of their own books, and I do not. If one is not careful one is soon writing to please reviewers and not their audience or themselves.

Louis L'Amour

#9. It's not that he doesn't appreciate beauty, he just appreciates it in his own way. I mean, if a poet sees a daffodil he stares at it and writes a long poem about it, but Twoflower wanders off to find a book on botany.

Terry Pratchett

#10. And suddenly, not a soul's at the store as for other & similar & just as blank reasons, they've gone to the silence, the suppers of their own mystery.

Jack Kerouac

#11. Religious fanatics want people to switch off their own minds, ignore the evidence, and blindly follow a holy book based upon private 'revelation'.

Richard Dawkins

#12. People wanted me to do a CD-ROM of 'Hitchhiker's,' and I thought, 'No, no.' I didn't want to just sort of reverse-engineer yet another thing from a book I'd already written. I think that the digital media are interesting enough in their own right to be worth originating something in.

Douglas Adams

#13. Even books are nurses, medicines are nurses. But we must work to bring about the time when man shall recognise his mastery over his own body. Herbs and medicines have power over us as long as we allow them; when we become strong, these external methods are no more necessary.

Swami Vivekananda

#14. In the quiet spaces opened up by the prolonged, undistracted reading of a book, people made their own associations, drew their own inferences and analogies, fostered their own ideas. They thought deeply as they read deeply.

Nicholas Carr

#15. Reading is a private act, private even from the person who wrote the book. Once the novel is out there, the author is beside the point. The reader and the book have their own relationship now, and should be left alone to work things out for themselves.

Ann Patchett

#16. If only I had grown up worshipping Julia Child. I was already grown up - thank you very much - when Julia Child's book was published. When I moved to New York in 1962, you had to own it.

Nora Ephron

#17. I haven't thought about writing so much as potentially producing and finding my own projects to get into production. I want to be able to buy the rights to a story that I have read or a book that I have read.

Mandy Moore

#18. I like it when you have something happening by coincidence. Just something in a book is enough. But I prefer a fragment of an image so you are far more free to bring in elements of your own.

Dries Van Noten

#19. What I had come to love about book club (besides the fabulous desserts and free liquor) was how in hearing so many opinions about the same book, your own opinion expanded, as if you'd read the book several times instead of just once.

Lorna Landvik

#20. There were some particular themes that I knew I wanted to hit, and when I got deeper into the project I found that it was becoming serious in and on its own. By the end, it's not very funny at all. I think, now, that part of the power of the book is that the jokes are kind of sparkly distractions.

Moshe Kasher

#21. I once read Updike after writing a first draft, and I wanted to put my own book on the fire. I've since learned to read utter crap while I'm writing: pulp is the thing.

John Niven

#22. If you try to control it too much, the book is dead. You have to let it fall apart quite early on and let it start doing its own thing. And that takes nerve, not to panic that the book you were going to write is not the book you will have at the end of the day.

Anne Enright

#23. No doubt this works well enough for The Tale of Benjamin Bunny or The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, but I can readily see that 'The Selfish Gene' on its own, without the large footnote of the book itself, might give an inadequate impression of its contents.

Richard Dawkins

#24. Really good 'hard' novels - say, Wolf Hall - yield, if you read them carefully, the information you need when you need it, in order to follow their paths. But there is a point at which subtle storytelling maneuvers outmaneuver their own intelligibility.

Daniel Menaker

#25. When kids don't learn about their own heritage in school, they just don't care about school ... But you won't see it in the history books unless we get the power to write our own history and tell our story ourselves.

Miles Davis

#26. Life, as the most ancient of all metaphors insists, is a journey; and the travel book, in its deceptive simulation of the journey's fits and starts, rehearses life's own fragmentation. More even than the novel, it embraces the contingency of things.

Jonathan Raban

#27. My major aim was to shape a book which would make its own comment, a wordless statement: to talk through the way it was shaped.

Doris Lessing

#28. To seek Divinity merely in books is to seek the living among the dead ... seek God within your own soul.

John Smith

#29. She is never alone when she has Her Books. Books, to her, are Friends. Give her Shakespeare or Jane Austen, Meredith or Hardy, and she is Lost - lost in a world of her own. She sleeps so little that most of her nights are spent reading.

E.M. Delafield

#30. A message To the children who have read this book. When you grow up and have children of your own, do please remember something important. A stodgy parent is no fun at all! What a child wants -and DESERVES- is a parent who is SPARKY! - Danny, the champion of the world.

Roald Dahl

#31. 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,

#32. Every night, I was read to. Every Friday, we were taken to the library. I always received at least one book for my birthday. I have a few of them yet. Early on, I had my own collection of books. I loved to read. Still do.

Avi

#33. Most of promoting seems unnatural to me, and I wish I didn't have to do it. I'm not especially good at tooting my own horn. However, I do love to connect with readers. That's why I try to keep up with my social media even when I don't have a new book coming out.

Linda Conrad

#34. Nor do they trust their tongue alone, but speak a language of their own; can read a nod, a shrug, a look, far better than a printed book; convey a libel in a frown, and wink a reputation down.

Jonathan Swift

#35. Everyone praises Sachin Tendulkar. He may be a genius in his own right but in my book, Rahul Dravid is the artist. Dravid's defence tactics, his strokes, his cuts, his grace are truly amazing. I'd like to meet the chap sometime and take my hat off to him.

Peter O'Toole

#36. One can live with the thought of one's own death. It is the thought of the death of the words and books that is terrifying for that is the deeper extinction.

Lance Morrow

#37. Careless of books, yet having felt the power
Of Nature, by the gentle agency
Of natural objects, led me on to feel
For passions that were not my own, and think
(At random and imperfectly indeed)
On man, the heart of man, and human life.

William Wordsworth

#38. Movies tell you what to think. A good book lets you choose a few thoughts for yourself. Movies show you the pink house. A good book tells you there's a pink house and lets you paint some of the finishing touches, maybe choose the roof style, park your own car out front.

Karen Marie Moning

#39. It's a memoir of various events in my own life, but it's also a teaching book: along the way I explain the writing decisions I made. They are the same decisions that confront every writer going in search of his or her past: matters of selection, reduction, organization and tone.

William Zinsser

#40. So then, in a pleading tone, he whispers: Why did you make me? I never wanted to be made ...
For propaganda, of course. It's all in your own book. How can we persuade others to be good, without evil we can point to?

William T. Vollmann

#41. Reading has made me more open, has improved my understanding, and has made me a better artiste, but it also makes me live in my own bubble. My mom keeps asking me, 'What do you read in that room the whole day?' Once I am into a book, I will finish it.

Sonam Kapoor

#42. Real education should consist of drawing the goodness and the best out of our own students. What better books can there be than the book of humanity?

Cesar Chavez

#43. I enjoy reading and I'm a huge kindle fan, the device you can read eBooks with. One of the best inventions of all times. I just recently purchased a Dostojewski collection, for just $1. At that rate I will probably own 3 million books soon.

Robert Pattinson

#44. I am ashamed to say this, but as a child, neither my parents not my teachers pushed me to read. In fact, I did not read an entire book through until I was a grown man and had learned the awesome power of reading on my own.

Daniel Whyte III

#45. Knowledge of the Absolute depends upon no book, nor upon anything; it is absolute in itself. No amount of study will give this knowledge; is not theory, it is realization. Cleanse the dust from the mirror, purify your own mind, and in a flash you know that you are Brahman.

Swami Vivekananda

#46. 'The Things They Carried' is labeled right inside the book as a work of fiction, but I did set out when I wrote the book to make it feel real ... I use my own name, and I dedicated the book to characters in the book to give it the form of a war memoir.

Tim O'Brien

#47. A book, while it is being written, has an intense life of its own which you share.

Margaret Bourke-White

#48. I needed to really pursue music and learn what I needed to learn on my own by getting in and doing it, not by reading a book about it.

Kacey Musgraves

#49. It is between fifty and sixty years since I read it (i.e. the Book of Revelations), and I then considered it merely the ravings of a maniac, no more worthy nor capable of explanation than the incoherence of our own nightly dreams.

Thomas Jefferson

#50. You want to know a secret?" I asked. "Sure," she said halfheartedly. "I love to sniff the insides of books," I said in a whisper. "Because each book has its own special perfume.

Jack Gantos

#51. Seeing your own name on the book cover is like hearing your book saying, Hi. Thanks for writing me!

Alvi Syahrin

#52. Take your future into your own hands. Make it happen. Life is a coloring book, but you have the pens.

Sophie Kinsella

#53. You always try to do your own thing. One of the things I wanted to do was to write a book that combines some of the best traits of contemporary fantasy with some of the traits of the historical novel.

George R R Martin

#54. Every book has some real life in it. I was never pursued by an evil twin clone, but everything else in MR. MURDER was pretty much out of my own life.

Dean Koontz

#55. The Chicago Way is a wonderful first novel. Michael Harvey has studied the masters and put his own unique touch on the crime novel. This book harkens the arrival of a major new voice.

Michael Connelly

#56. There are plenty of bad editors who try to impose their own vision on a book. ( ... )
A good novel editor is invisible.

Terri Windling

#57. It was nice doing my own Joy Division book to be able to put forward the fact that Ian was actually quite a nice guy and very hardworking, ambitious and loyal. But the thing was, he was battling such a dreadful illness in an era when they really didn't know how to treat it.

Peter Hook

#58. A good picture book can almost be whistled ... All have their own melodies behind the storytelling.

Margaret Wise Brown

#59. Most of the time our inner voice tries to guide us to 'Truth' but we, out of our own vested interests, wish to continue living in our own self-created illusions because it suits our purpose or fulfils our needs.

Kapil Kumar Bhaskar

#60. You have the power to create your own destiny. You just need to decide what you want and how badly you want it.

S.A. Healey

#61. When I was 11 years old, I thought, 'All I really wanna be able to do is my own comic book,' and I'm doing it. I don't have any other real ambitions. I have nothing to conquer at all.

Chris Ware

#62. The real power of books is their deep companionability. We learn from them as we learn from the deep companionability of love to know our own hearts and minds better.

Jane Rule

#63. He was already telling me about the very important book
with that smug look I know so well in a man holding forth, eyes fixed on the fuzzy far horizon of his own authority.

Rebecca Solnit

#64. No book on this planet can give you the description of terms like religion, spirituality, divinity unless you discover it within the realm of your own mind.

Abhijit Naskar

#65. We'd each roll to our side of the bed and let our own savior take us away. Soraya's was sleep. Mine, as always, was a book.

Khaled Hosseini

#66. There's a little book I'm thinking of writing - "Swan Song" is what I shall call it. The song of the dying. And my book will be incense burnt at the deathbed of this society, damned with the damnation of its own impotence.

Maxim Gorky

#67. The hero, the wonderful young Parisian in whom the romantic and the scientific temperaments were so strangely blended, became to him a kind of prefiguring type of himself. And, indeed, the whole book seemed to him to contain the story of his own life, written before he had lived it.

Oscar Wilde

#68. Any writer is inevitably going to work with his own anxieties and desires. If the book is any good it has got to have in it the fire of a personal unconscious mind.

Iris Murdoch

#69. Let this little book be thy friend, if, owing to fortune or through thine own fault, thou canst not find a dearer companion.

Johann Wolfgang Von Goethe

#70. Having a record company and putting out my own CD. There's clothes and shoes. There's also an upcoming book deal that I'm trying to do. I'm trying to be positive. I'm a big fan of the Nobel Peace Prize.

Metta World Peace

#71. In this way, I was able to place my own concerns aside and curl myself up in the cocoon of somebody else's imagination. My life was suspended - I was in neither one place nor the other.

Kate Kerrigan

#72. In general, my own experience of writing an adaptation of 'Evening' gave me a chance to get into different parts of the book.

Susan Minot

#73. Ideally a book would have no order in it, and the reader would have to discover his own.

Raoul Vaneigem

#74. I look at my first books and am glad they weren't published ... You start writing by imitating your heroes, then you keep the heart of that worship in your work. As time goes by, you get other influences and find your own voice.

Markus Zusak

#75. Stepping into the "shoes" of someone's life other than my own, great movies such as Cinema Paradiso, scenic landscapes, the work of Daniel Day-Lewis, the books of Joel Goldsmith, traveling, doughnuts, ice cream.

Reggie Lee

#76. We each contribute our own book to the great library of humanity.

Steve Maraboli

#77. Books should stand on their own feet ... If they need shoring up by a preface here, an introduction there, they have no more right to exist than a table that needs a wad of paper under one leg in order to stand steady.

Virginia Woolf

#78. When people are reading a book, it's a personal thing. They're reading it; it's in their own mind; it's in their own personal space when they're reading it.

Kristy Swanson

#79. There are many books which we think we have read when we have not. There are, at least, many that we think we remember when we do not. An original picture was, perhaps, imprinted upon the brain, but it has changed with our own changing minds. We only remember our remembrance.

Gilbert K. Chesterton

#80. We over-estimate the conscience of our friend. His goodness seems better than our goodness, his nature finer, his temptations less. Everything that is his,
his name, his form, his dress, books, and instruments,
fancy enhances. Our own thought sounds new and larger from his mouth.

Ralph Waldo Emerson

#81. I write my own stories. I like telling stories to little children. I think the good thing about stories is they carry you to another place which you've never been. And you feel like you're just enveloped by the book and the characters.

Georgie Henley

#82. The cool thing about having a book is that it takes on its own life. Once it's in the world, you can't follow it. You'd have to have a pretty fantastic surveillance system to track its migration.

Cate Marvin

#83. A book may not tell us exactly how to live our own lives, but our own lives can teach us how to read a book.

Rebecca Mead

#84. Many persons erroneously suppose that an author has always on hand an unlimited number of her own books; or that the publisher will kindly give her as many as she can want for herself and friends. This is by no means the case.

Eliza Leslie

#85. The book from which to learn religion, is your own mind.

Abhijit Naskar

#86. If you want to treat your book as a child, the finished book should be an adult, capable to stand on its own legs and able to weather the thunder. Not a baby that still needs to be defended.

Martyn V. Halm

#87. I don't really read children's books or deal with children's books, so I don't have any relationship with them other than my own.

Michael Ian Black

#88. Reading is actually plunging into one's own identity and, one hopes, emerging stronger than before. You see, unconsciously, we are seeking to find an affirmation to our own world perception and set of values.

Amalia Kahana-Carmon

#89. It's sort of an organic process when you're adapting any book, not even just your own. You want to preserve the heart of the story and you want to preserve who the characters are, but film requires a lot of compression.

Jonathan Tropper

#90. You have the power to pause stuff and you have the power to go to the bathroom. You can do whatever you want in your own home. It's a much more relaxed thing. It's more like a book, it seems to me. That's kind of the way I watch movies.

David Fincher

#91. Read a poem at a time, or two, or all, but give them time to sink into your heart. Read them again, read a portion, and stop and ponder. Visualize. Take it slow; let the poem show you what lies in your own heart. Let it fuel the words from within.

Salil Jha

#92. There are instances where lines in my work are borrowed or stolen from sources, mainly from books, or they become my own versions. A lot of the writing is my own, too. But if someone were to take each drawing and trace it back to its source, most of them could be traced back to a book or a text.

Raymond Pettibon

#93. She put that book down and picked up Ellis. Now, it is hardly possible to be bored by a book on sex when one is fifteen, but she was restless because this collection of interesting facts seemed to have so little to do with her own problems.

Doris Lessing

#94. Often the grind of book promotion wearies you of your own book - though at the same time this frees you from its clutches.

Julian Barnes

#95. You want to give him the book of his own life, the book that will locate him, parent him, arm him for the changes.

Michael Cunningham

#96. A true feeler always brings half the entertainment along with him. His own ideas are only call'd forth by what he reads, and the vibrations within, so entirely correspond with those excited, 'tis like reading himself and not the book.

Laurence Sterne

#97. It's good to make mistakes whether they are common or obscure, we learn more from our own mistakes while working rather than from any book or lecture.

Tanay Pant

#98. Other people's creativity inspires me. Seeing great art, or reading a fab book or watching an interesting documentary or an exciting film - these things make me want to let my own imagination fly.

Kate Cary

#99. Grandpa did everything at his own pace, a speed that my sister and I referred to as 'when snails attack.' ... My grandparents' house was only about ten miles from ours, but the ride there would necessitate sandwiches packed for the trip, and several books to keep us occupied.

Jenny Lawson

#100. Accordingly, no book can actually embody the knowledge of anything
of philosophical importance; only a mind can do that, since only a
mind can have this capacity to interpret and reinterpret its own understandings.

John M. Cooper