Top 100 Own Book Quotes
#1. 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
#2. 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
#3. 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
#4. We each contribute our own book to the great library of humanity.
Steve Maraboli
#5. 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
#6. Of course, each of us has to write our own book, live our own life.
Thomas L. Dumm
#8. I don't know what your childhood was like, but we didn't have much money. We'd go to a movie on a Saturday night, then on Wednesday night my parents would walk us over to the library. It was such a big deal, to go in and get my own book.
Robert Redford
#9. I suppose also that watching marketing and publicity stuff play out from behind the scenes, making those plans and seeing each piece fall into place or not, each year, for each book, has made me a little more tranquil about the process for my own book than I might otherwise be.
Danielle Dutton
#10. Sometimes I want to slap some of the characters with their own book.
Anonymous
#11. He'd had his own book published, Across the High Frontier - the one years before The Right Stuff or Yeager! - so he wasn't shy when it came to publicity.
Donald K. Slayton
#12. I might go on discussing this subject at great length, but after all is said, done, and written, my own book of experiences will best show what these obstacles are, and how I managed to overcome them to some extent.
Major Taylor
#13. I once tried hawking my own book around the pubs in the hope that, like the Salvation Army, I too could sell to the cerebrally relaxed. It was a disaster. I had beer thrown over me for being a) a nuisance, b) not as good as Wordsworth and c) a nancy for writing poetry in the first place.
Peter Finch
#14. I've never gone back to the stacks after my book's expiration at the front of the store. Not because I'm above it or anything, but I'd be mortified if someone caught me looking for my own book.
Kaui Hart Hemmings
#15. Write your own book instead of reading someone else's book about success
Herb Brooks
#16. Thank you, I said. I have lived in my own book. One I never planned to write, recording time backwards and forwards.
Patti Smith
#17. Now the good gods forbid That our renowned Rome, whose gratitude Towards her deserved children is enrolled In Jove's own book, like an unnatural dam Should now eat up her own!
William Shakespeare
#18. The fourth rule is: "Make the enemy live up to their own book of rules." You can kill them with this, for they can no more obey their own rules than the Christian church can live up to Christianity.
Saul Alinsky
#19. You apply the skills you use to produce your own book to make an anthology. Shaping. Rhythm.
Robyn Davidson
#20. Who is your favorite character in the series? Or ... if that's too hard, why do you like each one and who drives you crazy?
Puck: Well, she likes me best, of course. I'm the handsome, charming one.
Ash: Yes, that's why she gave you your own book. Oh, wait.
Puck: No one asked you, ice-boy.
Julie Kagawa
#21. When I was 8 years old, I made my own encyclopedia of American biography - Johnny Appleseed, Jim Bowie, Davy Crockett, Daniel Boone, Charles Lindbergh, my pantheon of favorite heroes. Then I would write my own things and sew them together and try to make my own book.
Douglas Brinkley
#23. Listening to Led Zeppelin's Heartbreaker while reading your own book, sipping a beer after midnight, is a satisfying feeling...however fleeting.
Jonathan Heatt
#24. I actually own a copy of my own book; that's how dedicated I am as an author.
John Hodgman
#25. Remember, lad," said the newt, "If it's going to be tommorow, it might as well be today. And if it is today, it could have been yesterday. If it was yesterday, then you're over and done with it, and can write your own book. Think about that.
Avi
#26. It was a really strange and unique sort of process for me to adapt my own book.
Seth Grahame-Smith
#27. The fundamental difficulty that most novelists face when they are trying to adapt their own book into a screenplay is realizing that a screenplay is a completely different way of storytelling, and it has limitations.
Barry Eisler
#28. In my own book-signings, I find humility. It's always humbling when people go out of their way to come visit with me and by some of my books.
Nicholas Trandahl
#29. Adapting your own book is like performing open-heart surgery on your own child.
Jonathan Tropper
#30. If you do finish the book and are still scared of me and people of my ilk, then I recommend you schedule an appointment with a therapist. Either that, or try writing your own book
Maz Jobrani
#31. But I felt as if I'd just been Photoshopped out of my own book cover. And if there was one thing I wasn't used to, it was being ignored
Rick Riordan
#32. Every person writes his own book with the example of his life.
Casper Silk
#33. All religions have periods in their history which are looked back to with retrospective fear and trembling as eras of persecution, and each religion has its own book of martyrs.
Richard Le Gallienne
#34. Make the enemy live up to its own book of rules.
Saul Alinsky
#35. What I've done for the last ten years is develop high profile entertainment properties for animation, so it's kind of funny to be able to create my own book to already know how I'd want to develop it for animation and live action.
Eric Wight
#36. No one wants a masterpiece knocking around when your own book is looking for attention.
Tibor Fischer
#37. I walked into my own book, seeking peace.
It was night, and I made a careless movement inside the dream; I turned too brusquely the corner and I bruised myself against my madness.
Anais Nin
#38. Now, to describe the process of the Wrapped Reichstag, which went from 1971 to '95, there is an entire book about that, because each one of our projects has its own book. The book is not an art book, meaning it's not written by an art historian.
Christo
#39. Who can say they saw a whole play or read a whole book? Each has their own experience, their own play, their own book
Johnny Rich
#40. Everybody knows by now that there's a gazillion books on me either out or coming out in the near future. So I'm encouraging anybody who's ever met me, heard me or even seen me, to get in on the action and scribble their own book. You never know, somebody might have a great book in them.
Bob Dylan
#41. 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
#42. The book of Isaiah is a tract for our own times; our very aversion to it testifies to its relevance.
Hugh Nibley
#43. 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
#44. 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
#45. One book, printed in the Heart's own wax / Is worth a thousand in the stack's
Jan Luyken
#46. 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
#47. 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
#48. 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
#49. 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
#50. 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
#51. 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
#52. 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
#53. 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
#54. 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
#55. 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
#56. 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
#57. 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
#58. 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
#59. 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
#60. 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
#61. 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
#62. 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
#63. 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
#64. 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
#65. 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
#66. To seek Divinity merely in books is to seek the living among the dead ... seek God within your own soul.
John Smith
#67. 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
#68. 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
#69. 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,
#70. 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
#71. 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
#72. 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
#73. 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
#74. 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
#75. 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
#76. 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
#77. 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
#78. 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
#79. 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
#80. 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
#81. 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
#82. 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
#83. '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
#84. A book, while it is being written, has an intense life of its own which you share.
Margaret Bourke-White
#85. 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
#86. 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
#87. 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
#88. Seeing your own name on the book cover is like hearing your book saying, Hi. Thanks for writing me!
Alvi Syahrin
#89. Take your future into your own hands. Make it happen. Life is a coloring book, but you have the pens.
Sophie Kinsella
#90. 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
#91. 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
#92. 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
#93. There are plenty of bad editors who try to impose their own vision on a book. ( ... )
A good novel editor is invisible.
Terri Windling
#94. 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
#95. A good picture book can almost be whistled ... All have their own melodies behind the storytelling.
Margaret Wise Brown
#96. 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
#97. 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
#98. 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
#99. 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
#100. 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
