Quotes About A Great Book

#1. I have an ambition to write a great book, but that's really a competition with myself. I've noticed that a lot of young writers, people in all media, want to be famous but they don't really want to do anything. I can't think of anything less worth striving for than fame.

Zadie Smith

#2. I went on a Buddha jag. I read 'Confession of a Buddhist Atheist' by Stephen Batchelor and Karen Armstrong's biography of Buddha, which is a great book.

Denis O'Hare

#3. 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

#4. But you're kind of like a great book ... you know, you pick up a book at the bookstore because it has a beautiful cover ... but it's what's inside that pulls you in.

Miranda Kenneally

#5. The only way to write a great book is to write it with the eyes of a child who sees things for the first time.

Arnold Bennett

#6. Most of the books that I've adapted I'm doing because I love the book and I feel like it's a great work of art in itself, and when it's a great book I feel as a director or a writer that I have a responsibility to rise to the level of the original. It makes me try to reach higher.

James Franco

#7. A great book feeds our soul and nourishes our spirit in a way nothing else can.

C.S. Lakin

#8. A great book is a thing of mystery and beauty; it has the power to move you.

Neil Leckman

#9. A great book remains eternally in one's memory as today's legend.

Mayi Ngwala

#10. Now I've given up any hope of lasting fame or literary perfection. I don't care if I write a great book anymore, but just one which, whatever its flaws, will leave a record of my impossible life.

Jeffrey Eugenides

#11. I believe if you write a great book, the chances are it'll get a great reception.

Charlaine Harris

#12. The mark of a good book is that you're happy to come home to it. The mark of a great book is that you occasionally schedule your life to stay home with it.

Derek Thompson

#13. No one writes a great book every time out, or even a good book.

Stewart O'Nan

#14. The world is a great book ... they who never stir from home read only a page.

Augustine Of Hippo

#15. Writing a great book is like creating a gourmet meal! Those who thoroughly enjoyed your book will come back to get fed again.

Darrell Gibbs

#16. A great book increases my heartbeat as if I'm prey, melts my insides in anticipation of a first kiss, immerses me in its depths.

Carmen DeSousa

#17. Two must-haves for me are a great book and my iPod.

Kelly Clarkson

#18. Many believers get together to discuss a great book and mistakenly call it Bible study. That is, in fact, a book club with a spiritual theme.

Jen Hatmaker

#19. The most revealing books are the Holy Koran and the Holy Bible. The Bhagavad Gita is a great book as well, and the works of Buddha. These are the major influences on the world.

RZA

#20. I would much rather be known as the mother of a great son than the author of a great book or the painter of a great masterpiece.

Rose Kennedy

#21. I like to read and dream and create music that is based on the imagery of text. If you have the combination of a great book and a great filmmaker, what could be better for the composer?

Howard Shore

#22. I found a great book called 'Slang Through the Ages' by Jonathon Green. It's basically a thesaurus of historical slang, and had lots of great old uses.

Scott Westerfeld

#23. Reading only a bit of a great book (e.g., Plato's Republic) is like getting engaged but never marrying. The initial experience is pleasurable but can become frustrating if prolonged.

John Reynolds

#24. A man can write one book that can be great, but this doesn't make him a great writer-just the writer of a great book ... I think a writer has to extend very widely, as well as plunge very deep, to be a great novelist.

Anthony Burgess

#25. Socrates called himself a midwife of ideas. A great book is often such a midwife, delivering to full existence what has been coiled like an embryo in the dark, silent depths of the brain.

Clifton Fadiman

#26. A great book provides escapism for me. The artistry and the creativity in a story are better than any drugs.

Wentworth Miller

#27. It's absolutely philistine not to recognize what a great book 'An American Dream' is. Norman Mailer is his own worst enemy, and if you don't catch him in a defensive position, he'll admit it. I'd really like to help that man.

Germaine Greer

#28. A great book is like great evil.

Callimachus

#29. If Brideshead Revisited is not a great book, it's so like a great book that many of us, at least while reading it, find it hard to tell the difference.

Evelyn Waugh

#30. The books that help you most are those which make you think the most. A great book that comes from a great thinker is a ship of thought, deep freighted with truth and beauty.
1810-1860, Minister

Theodore Parker

#31. A good book, he had concluded, leaves you wanting to reread the book. A great book compels you to reread your own soul. Such books were for him rare and, as he aged, rarer. Still he searched, one more Ithaca for which he was forever bound.

Richard Flanagan

#32. Being influential is not the mark of a great book.

Mortimer Adler

#33. I think Maus I is better than Maus II. The standard here is whether or not it's as good as a great book of prose literature and by that standard, no, it's not that great.

Ted Rall

#34. Sometimes I get jealous when I'm reading a great book by a younger writer. But 'White Tiger' is so good, I almost forgot to hate Aravind Adiga.

David Benioff

#35. There's no point in making a film out of a great book. The book's already great. What's the point?

Neil Jordan

#36. Florida's not the hick town you keep saying it is," says Reynolds. "Times have changed; they've got good universities now and a great book festival! Thousands of people come to it!

Margaret Atwood

#37. The Wars is a great book, rich in its images, its language, its construction, and, ultimately, its conception.

Guy Vanderhaeghe

#38. Everybody's idea of a great book is different, of course. For me it's one that makes my jaw drop on every page, the writing is so original.

Carl Hiaasen

#39. Nothing can compare to the feeling evoked by turning the page in a great book.

Aneta Cruz

#40. But I'm also addicted to books. And I know there has never been a human being or a television show, no matter how great, that could measure up to a great book.

Sherman Alexie

#41. Ring sense is an art, a gift from God that flows out of a fighter like a great painting flows out of an artist, or a great book flows out of an author.

Ray Arcel

#42. I was very much influenced by a great book by the scholar Neil Richards called Intellectual Privacy, that [Louis] Brandeis changed his mind on the proper balance between dignity and free speech.

Jeffrey Rosen

#43. Reading a great book causes jolts and frights.

Mason Cooley

#44. A great book is one, which really don't finish when it finishes.

Aman Jassal

#45. That's the thing about a great book. Every time you read it, it's different, because you're different. You've changed since the last time you picked it up, things have happened to you.

Jessica Zafra

#46. I can't go into Oklahoma without thinking about Larry Clark's photography book 'Tulsa.' It's a great book about how life works.

Buzz Osborne

#47. If you don't like peas,it is probably because you have not had them fresh.It is the difference between reading a great book and reading the summary on the back

Lemony Snicket

#48. Grammar and ordinary language are bad guides to metaphysics. A great book might be written showing the influence of syntax on philosophy.

Bertrand Russell

#49. A great book should leave you with many experiences, and slightly exhausted at the end. You live several lives while reading.

William Styron

#50. There's a great book about John Kennedy and his relationship to civil rights called 'The Bystander.' The title alone suggests that he did as little as possible, any minimal critical effort, to really facilitate civil rights in the White House.

Michael Eric Dyson

#51. The truly great books are always novels: 'Anna Karenina,' 'The Brothers Karamazov,' 'The Magic Mountain.' Just as with 'Shahnameh,' I browse these books from time to time to remember how a great book works on us or to teach my students at Columbia University.

Orhan Pamuk

#52. Life is a great Book. We are writing the history of our time.

Lailah Gifty Akita

#53. You can write a great book and be ignored. Literary history is full of classics that were under-appreciated in their own time.

William Landay

#54. I don't usually read self-help books, but I read a great book by a guy called Wayne Dyer: 'The Power of Intention,' which I loved.

Chris Pine

#55. There is actually a great book called Prima Donna by Rupert -Christiansen that deconstructs the myth. In fact, many of the women who were prima donnas were feminists and incredible forces for their time.

Rufus Wainwright

#56. You'll learn that the key to a great book is editing - grinding, buffing, and polishing - not writing.

Guy Kawasaki

#57. There's a great book about that, "The Breaking Point" by Stephen Koch . It won't improve your opinion of [Ernest] Hemingway.

George Packer

#58. I was a big reader as a child. My father is a great book lover and a librarian, but he forbid me to read bad literature. I was not allowed to read Nancy Drew or books like that. I often say to him that me becoming a crime author is both a way of pleasing him and annoying him.

Asa Larsson

#59. There is a great book out called 'Everything I Needed to Learn I Learned in Kindergarten,' and I believe that everything I ever needed to learn on guitar was in my first two years of hungry learning: Scotty Moore, Hank Marvin, Chet Atkins, Lenny Breau, Chuck Berry and Bo Diddley.

Randy Bachman

#60. It takes a great reader to make a great book.

Orna Ross

#61. Are you busy?" the caller would ask. "Yes I'm working." Sitting in my chair, cats nearby, I was reading a great book. That was my job this year, and it was a good one. The salary was nonexistent, but the satisfaction was daily and deep.

Nina Sankovitch

#62. I've heard people, usually writers, say that no one wrote a great book after winning the Booker, but I honestly did not feel any big pressure. 'The Gathering' did hang over me in that it was darker than I thought at the time.

Anne Enright

#63. I have a great book. It's called Stantasyland. Except I don't have the money to buy a million copies to put it on the bestsellers list.

Stanley Victor Paskavich

#64. I think that the mark of a great book is that it will meet you wherever you're at and you'll feel and experience something new and different each time you read it.

Josh Radnor

#65. If we marvel at the artist who has written a great book, we must marvel more at those people whose lives are works of art and who don't even know it, who wouldn't believe it if they were told. However hard work good writing may be, it is easier than good living.

Katherine Paterson

#66. Recognize the evidence through which the world speaks to us like a great book ...

Umberto Eco

#67. A great book is a homing device
For navigating paradise.
A good book somehow makes you care
About the comfort of a chair.
A bad book owes to many trees
A forest of apologies.

J. Patrick Lewis

#68. Be skeptical about this one. It's a great book. But try to be a filter, not a sponge.

Stephen Chbosky

#69. When I had no money, and a great book came out, I couldn't get it. I had to wait. I love the idea that I have hardcover books here and at home that I haven't read yet. That's how I view that I'm rich. I have hardcover books I may never read.

Sherman Alexie

#70. Few things linger longer or become more indwelling than that feeling of both completion and emptiness when a great book ends. That the book accompanies the reader forever from that day forward is part of literature's profligate generosity.

Pat Conroy

#71. A great book allows me to leap over that wall: in a deep, significant conversation with another consciousness, I feel human and unalone.

David Shields

#72. Nonviolent Communication by Marshall Rosenberg is a great book teaching a compassionate way to talk to people even if you (or they) are angry.

Joe Vitale

#73. 'Undertones of War' by Edmund Blunden seems to get less attention than the memoirs of Siegfried Sassoon and Robert Graves, but it is a great book.

Pat Barker

#74. I definitely have a spiritual outlook. I don't usually read self-help books, but I read a great book by a guy called Wayne Dyer, The Power of Intention, which I loved. I'm not a religious guy, in fact I'm probably agnostic but I thought what this writer had to say was really powerful.

Chris Pine

#75. It can be hard to write a skillfully entertaining fiction, but a great book wants to be more, and wants more from us.

Guy Gavriel Kay

#76. Go APE: Author a great book, Publish it quickly, and Entrepreneur your way to success. Self-publishing isn't easy, but it's fun and sometimes even lucrative. Plus, your book could change the world.

Guy Kawasaki

#77. In my opinion, what makes a great book is something that is universally specific.

Anne Hathaway

#78. Melville's example demonstrates the wisdom of waiting to read the classics. Coming to a great book on your own after having accumulated essential life experience can make all the difference.

Nathaniel Philbrick

#79. A great thing is a great book; but a greater thing than all is the talk of a great man.

Benjamin Disraeli

#80. Being a bestseller doesnt mean they wrote a great book. Just means they knew a lot of people who would buy it.

David A. Santos

#81. The first drafts of my novels have all been written in longhand, and then I type them up on my old electric. I have resisted getting a computer because I distrust the whole PC thing. I don't think a great book has yet been written on computer.

J.G. Ballard

#82. A great book begins with an idea; a great life, with a determination.

Louis L'Amour

#83. Nobody sits down and says, 'Well, I'm going to write a bad book.' They sit down to write a great book, but it doesn't always turn out like that. The writer may do his best and still write a so-so book, and other times, it just flows easily. But I don't know how you can control that.

Gilbert Morris

#84. A good book tells a story, and the reader is either pleased or displeased, intrigued or bored. A great book invites the reader to respond, to argue, to challenge.

Harold S. Kushner

#85. A good book ... leaves you wanting to reread the book. A great book compels you to reread your own soul.

Richard Flanagan

#86. And I know there has never been a human being or a television show, no matter how great, that could measure up to a great book. But

Sherman Alexie

#87. The fact that at the moment the distinction is being made, a young adult, as opposed to an adult, is the one reading it. In other words, I don't entirely believe in the distinction. A great book is a great book, and it's impossible to say what part of a person is going to connect to it.

Kristin Cashore

#88. You cannot be afraid, Read the book. Smile at it. It's a great book-the greatest book you've ever read.

Markus Zusak

#89. The only difference was one of them was trying to make a perfect cake and one of them was trying to write a great book. But if we remove that from the equation, it's the same impulse and they are equally entitled to their ecstasies and their despair.

Michael Cunningham

#90. What you don't know would make a great book.

Sydney Smith

#91. A great book seeks to explain causality, not correlation. It works to point out the circumstances in which it works, and where it doesn't. And in so doing, it is broadly applicable.

Clayton Christensen

#92. Examining the world in order to find consolation is very much like looking carefully over the pages of a great book in order to find our own name ... Whether we find what we want or not, our preoccupation has hindered us from a true knowledge of the contents.

George Eliot

#93. A good book gets better at the second reading. A great book at the third. Any book not worth rereading isn't worth reading.

Nassim Nicholas Taleb

#94. A book is a human fact; a great book like Seraphita gathers together numerous psychological elements. These elements become coherent through a sort of psychological beauty. It does the reader a service.

Gaston Bachelard

#95. 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

#96. When writing a book what is more important? Grammar and spelling or telling a great story? I know which I would choose.

Samuel Colbran

#97. Thanks for being the kind of person who likes to pick up a book. That's a genuinely great thing. I met a librarian recently who said she doesn't read because books are her job and when she goes home, she just wants to switch off. I think we can agree that that's creepy as hell.

Max Barry

#98. 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

#99. A great large book is a great evil.

Joseph Addison

#100. Life involves effort and growth. You won't grow by watching a situation comedy, though you can grow by reading a book. I hope we aren't becoming a nation of watchers, because what made us great is that we've always been a nation of doers.

Ronald Reagan