The Book Quotes

#1. You have to write the book that wants to be written. And if the book will be too difficult for grown-ups, then you write it for children.

Madeleine L'Engle

#2. To me the question is always this: if a ray of light came out of the sky and said, "Your next book will never be published - would you still write it?" If the answer is yes, the book is worth writing.

Markus Zusak

#3. One of my favorites: I feel stupid asking, but I've learned it's more stupid not to ask what I don't know. From the book Magic Numbers

Deb Hosey White

#4. Her mouth jittered. Her cold arms were folded. Tears were frozen to the book thief's face.

Markus Zusak

#5. HOLIDAY MEANS HOLIDAY; DON'T BE TEMPTED TO WORK ON YOUR WEEK OFF

FROM THE BOOK PROGRAMMED SHEEP

Lord M.A. Fricker

#6. I did with my wife a comic book for the Raynham Hall Museum in Long Island. They sell the book every single time a busload of kids comes in.

Ernie Colon

#7. For me,the greater part of writing is daydreaming, dreaming the dream of my story until it hatches out-the writing down of it I always find hard.But I love finishing it,then holding the book in my hand and sharing my dream with my readers.

Michael Morpurgo

#8. 38. There is not a moving (living) creature on earth, nor a bird that flies with its two wings, but are communities like you. We have neglected nothing in the Book, then unto their Lord they (all) shall be gathered.

Anonymous

#9. I'm always reading. Here's where an ebook reader really comes into its own. When I travel, it allows me to carry a huge chunk of my library with me. Usually, when I am writing one project, I am researching the next or beginning to pull together the material for the book after that.

Michael Scott

#10. An act of justice closes the book on a misdeed; an act of vengeance writes one of its own

Marilyn Vos Savant

#11. The only book that is worth writing is the one we don't have the courage or strength to write. The book that hurts us (we who are writing), that makes us tremble, redden, bleed

Helene Cixous

#12. Come to the book as you would come to an unexplored land. Come without a map. Explore it and draw your own map.

Stephen King

#13. I spent the rest of my day in someone else's story. The rare moments that I put the book down, my own pain returned in burning stabs. I felt like a circus knife thrower's target. If I held my mind immobile, I might avoid being hit by the blades whizzing by my head.

Amy Plum

#14. Every book I've written has been a different attempt to understand something, and the success or failure of the previous one is irrelevant. I write the book I want.

Yann Martel

#15. I do not know whether many people realize how much more than is ever written there really is in a story - how many parts of it are never told - how much more really happened than there is in the book one holds in one's hand and pores over.

Frances Hodgson Burnett

#16. There were momentary visitations. I was a visitor, not an inhabitant. I think I say that at the beginning of the book: "I have made visits to the earth in my body, but it's always been as a visitor."

Eve Ensler

#17. I love writing. I've always written journals. I loved writing the book on living alone.

Barbara Feldon

#18. I feel that women and men should free themselves up. It took me a while to get over my dysphoria about shopping in the men's section, trying on men's clothes, but when I was thinking about my life and the kind of woman I wanted to be, it was never just this by-the-book feminine thing.

Hari Nef

#19. I think of myself as naturally idle. The trouble is, the 'nothing' that I do every day is not really nothing. I potter. I muck about with emails, I make coffee, I fiddle with my computer to make sure that the book I haven't started writing is perfectly synced across all platforms and devices.

Robert Webb

#20. Next to the Bible, the book I value most is John Bunyan's Pilgrim's Progress. I believe I have read it through at least a hundred times. It is a volume of which I never seem to tire; and the secret of its freshness is that it is so largely compiled from the Scriptures.

Charles Spurgeon

#21. Don't hold me to anything in the book. I'm a waffler. I like wafflers. They said John Kerry was a waffler, but I admired him for that - showed he could change his mind.

Jonathan Ames

#22. [ ... ] I'm about to get on a plane here, and I'm packing recovery literature. All I know is I'm going to be the guy reading the book on co-dependency. That's what I know about me.

Marc Maron

#23. I've only written two novels, neither of them published, where the book is dominated by a male point of view; in the 'Onyx Court' series, it's split roughly 50/50.

Marie Brennan

#24. You Never Know....what is in the book that you read may lead you to....

Kelvin

#25. The book: an umbrella against ignorance

Andre Letria

#26. I wanted, of course, for this bittersweet season to be over. I felt so strongly that when I finished the book, I'd be free to move into another season, one of life and celebration. But this is what I know now: they're the same thing, and that's all there is.

Shauna Niequist

#27. The book. The book ... think about a book. What a perfect invention. The best and most important ever.

Jann Arden

#28. We're seeing the fulfillment of the Book of Judges here in our own time - every man doing that which is right in his own eyes.

Michele Bachmann

#29. Leuconoe, close the book of fate, For troubles are in store, ... Live today, tomorrow is not.

Horace

#30. Indeed, it occasionally seems as if the book has attempted to inoculate itself against the prospect of actually being read.

Roger Moorhouse

#31. Each record in the 'Book of Angels' series is meant to be unique in terms of the compositions.

John Zorn

#32. As John Reader understatedly observes in the book Missing Links, "It is remarkable how often the first interpretations of new evidence have confirmed the preconceptions of its discoverer." All

Bill Bryson

#33. Aside from your name on the cover of the book, your voice should be your most distinctive signature.

Douglas Wilson

#34. I'm telling you, writing the book is easy. The after part will break your back. Not to mention your heart.

Suzy Soro

#35. There were thousands of brown books in leather bindings, some chained to the book-shelves and others propped against each other as if they had had too much to drink and did not really trust themselves. These gave out a smell of must and solid brownness which was most secure.

T.H. White

#36. I like the varying rhythm of being a writer that you have a period of being in complete isolation where it's just you and the book and your screenplay and no-one can read it.

Patrick Marber

#37. You start at the stupid end of the book, and if you're lucky you finish at the smart end.

Salman Rushdie

#38. Of all literature I studied, the book that did more than any other to fire my enthusiasm was Philosophy and Opinions of Marcus Garvey.

Kwame Nkrumah

#39. I did go there later, but I hadn't been there before I wrote the book. Sometimes I feel like the imagined can feel more real than the real?

Alice Hoffman

#40. Everyone thinks I'm a smart arse who can solve any bloody problem. I'm not. I'm just a very old businessman and a very experienced businessman who made every mistake in the book and can recognise one when I see one.

John Harvey-Jones

#41. 'Drown' was always a hybrid book. It's connected stories - partially a story collection but partially a novel. I always wanted the reader to decide which genre they thought the book belonged to more - story, novel, neither, both.

Junot Diaz

#42. The bookcase tipped and the book covers opened like wings over an underbelly of white feathers, dirty with ink.

Anthony Marra

#43. Fucking hell, Woods!' squealed Decker. 'You really are retarded!' Or he squealed something similar. I was no longer listening. He now held the book aloft and was waving it around like the monkey with the bone at the beginning of 2001: A Space Odyssey.

Gavin Extence

#44. Burn the book. It serves you once.
Read the book. Serves you for a lifetime.
Lend the book. It serves for generations to come.

Kowtham Kumar K

#45. I really love 'Bridget Jones's Diary' - and I love the book, too. You wonder how it ever got made into a movie. She's supposed to be chubby, and two of the hottest guys ever are straight-up fighting over her?

Mindy Kaling

#46. I think the book struck me in a few ways that I thought very interesting to pick it as my first martial arts film. It has a very strong female character and it was very abundant in classic Chinese textures.

Ang Lee

#47. I've read The Satanic Verses and I thought it a nasty, sneering, free-thinking book ... I can understand why the book is offensive and it didn't seem to me to be anything but offensive when I read it.

Maurice Cowling

#48. Since it's fiction, the book resonates, at least for me, on various levels, some of which intimate ideas about history but none of which have the kind of directly causal reasoning you cite.

Rachel Kushner

#49. I am delighted with the book! I could spend my whole life reading it. - Catherine Morland

Jane Austen

#50. I'm a book girl
I love all the stories the world has to offer. No matter the book, I will taste it and drink it down.

Mizuki Nomura

#51. Every author believes that the book which he is placing before the public will 'fill a long-felt want,' and success or failure depends very much on how closely he has been able to gauge the nature of the 'long-felt want.'

Will C. Barnes

#52. She kept sliding down, in small half-willing surrenders, till she was a heap, with the book held tiringly above her face.

Alan Hollinghurst

#53. 'The Practical Heart' was published one week before the World Trade towers collapsed. Book reviewing and all else in our culture stopped dead-still for half a year. I went on the book tour anyway. But I felt like the apostle Paul going unto the catacombs where scared believers hid and prayed.

Allan Gurganus

#54. If thou trusteth to the book called the Scriptures, thou trusteth to the rotten staff of fables and falsehood.

Thomas Paine

#55. Memoir today is like one big game of misery poker: The more outlandish, outrageous, or just plain out-there the recounted life, the more likely the book is to attract the attention of reviewers, talk-show bookers, and, ultimately, the public.

Ben Yagoda

#56. If the book is second-hand, I leave all its markings intact, the spoor of previous readers, fellow-travellers who have recorded their passage by means of scribbled comments, a name on the fly-leaf, a bus ticket to mark a certain page.

Alberto Manguel

#57. I'd like my readers to feel they want to follow my characters off the page at the end of the book.

Vanessa Couchman

#58. I had a love affair with books, with characters and their words. Books kept me company. When the voices of the book faded, as with the last long chord of a record, the back cover crinkling closed, I could swear I heard a door click shut.

Marya Hornbacher

#59. (T)here was a story they used to tell at home about a girl whose punishment was that every time she opened her mouth, snakes and toads came out, snakes and toads with every word. The book didn't say what she did about it, but I've always assumed she probably ended up keeping her mouth shut.

Thomas Mann

#60. I can't think of any flower that wouldn't be suitable to merge with an image of a newborn, and as I was planning for the book, Miracle, I was drawn to blossoms that appealed to me artistically.

Anne Geddes

#61. You can't always go by the book, even in comedy.

Alan Bates

#62. The book that I shall make people read
is the book of the heart,
which holds the key
to the mystery of life

Meher Baba

#63. More than half the skill of writing lies in tricking the book out of your own head.

Terry Pratchett

#64. Unlike the book, with a documentary, you get a chance to show much more texture and color. Film gives you get a chance to focus on much more individuals who are pivotal in changing the landscape of American culture.

Steve Stoute

#65. We have preserved the book, and the book has preserved us.

David Ben-Gurion

#66. The book which you read from a sense of duty, or because for any reason you must, does not commonly make friends with you.

William Dean Howells

#67. Very rarely does anyone say that the TV is better than the book.

Gerald Seymour

#68. I like to sit down every day and not know where the book is going. I have no idea where the book is going to go or how it's going to end as I'm writing it.

Ted Bell

#69. For the only true sequel is the one that flickers briefly into being in your mind, O my friend by the fireside, in the moments after you read the last paragraph and lay the book down.

Michael Chabon

#70. With the book on my knee , i was happy ,i feared nothing except interruption.

Charlotte Bronte

#71. A promise to the Church is far more important than any other promise. Not just because the Church protects you, but because the Church is always watching you.
- The Book of Truth, Veraxis, Article 1340

Stacia Kane

#72. Your function as a critic is to show that it is really you yourself who should have written the book, if you had had the time, and since you hadn't you are glad that someone else had, although obviously it might have been done better.

Stephen Potter

#73. The main benefit of the book for the more experienced practitioners is as an evangelical tool. The book will give you some ways of expressing the value and importance of your work that you may not have had before.

Jesse James Garrett

#74. A material thing is first of all "the only bridge of communication between two minds." The bridge is a passage, but it is also distance maintained. The materiality of the book keeps two minds at an equal distance, whereas explication is the annihilation of one mind by another.

Jacques Ranciere

#75. Books and novels in particular that grapple with quite a few things are difficult to explain, so I think that first line can come in a substitute for trying to form a longer sense of what the book is about.

Alice Sebold

#76. About the new saga of Camp Half-Blood, Percy continues to narrate the book? Rachel (the new Delphic oracle) will remain on the books (I am Brazilian and I love your books ... I can not wait for the books debut in Portuguese).

Rick Riordan

#77. A young lady went into a bookstore and asked the clerk for Irving Stone's book, "Immoral Wife." The title is "Immortal Wife," the clerk replied. "I'll get it for you." Oh, please don't bother, If that's the correct name of the book, I don't think I'd care for it. I had something else in mind.

James Keller

#78. The book of nature is written in the language of mathematics.

Galileo Galilei

#79. Though I said that affection was the greatest enemy of love, I would never deny that it's a very good substitute. I'm not sure that a marriage founded on it isn't the happiest.
[The book-bag]

W. Somerset Maugham

#80. The Book of Mormon changes lives.

Thomas S. Monson

#81. Got bitten by the book bug?

Maryann Gestwicki

#82. We fell
into the book of love
stumbling through the pages
filling up the paragraphs
creating new chapters
right till the very last page
where we fell
out of the book
breaking into pieces
as we fell apart.

Pyrokardia

#83. I'm always frustrated when somebody makes a movie out of a book and they leave the book behind, or the heart of it.

Sean Penn

#84. When you let Soul drive the bus, life flows more effortlessly.
From the book, Doing a 360, page 8

Nancy Ash

#85. When I wiped you from the book of memory, I did not know I was striking out half my life

Nizar Qabbani

#86. Oh! I am delighted with the book! I should like to spend my whole life in reading it.

Jane Austen

#87. The point is, there's this new sense of skepticism and questioning toward tech, even if it is pretty inchoate. What I hope the book helps to do is help people clarify what is amiss, by presenting a critique that is grounded in economics.

Astra Taylor

#88. I had evoked - and the book was indeed all I had suspected.

H.P. Lovecraft

#89. Certainly in the case of 'Kill Your Friends,' a book I wrote more than 10 years ago, I routinely meet interviewers who appear to know the book better than I do. But still, you have to talk about it.

John Niven

#90. Don't tell me you're reading it,' she said, as if I were doing something to the book, whereas in fact the book was doing something to me.

Sara Levine

#91. Don't ever let the other stuff get in the way of your inherent skills as a kick-butt storyteller. Move the reader, make them happy and sad and excited and scared. Make them stare into space after they've put the book down, thinking about the tale that's become a part of them.

James Dashner

#92. Currently he was going through the entire Nero Wolfe series by Rex Stout, He'd just finished Murder by the Book and was in the process of downloading Triple Jeopardy to his e-reader when the alarm went off.

Keith R.A. DeCandido

#93. The book trade invented literary prizes to stimulate sales, not to reward merit.

Michael Moorcock

#94. Whatever else the Book of Mormon makes clear, it makes clear that every soul in every dispensation is precious to God, and therefore no age or era was-or is-left without its witness of Christ.

Jeffrey R. Holland

#95. When I am writing political op-eds, I do think carefully about the impact of my words. When I am writing fiction, it's a different story. In my fiction I am more reckless. I don't care about the real world until I am done with the book.

Elif Safak

#96. Reading, like writing, is a creative act. If readers only bring a narrow range of themselves to the book, then they'll only see their narrow range reflected in it.

Ben Okri

#97. Look, don't just stare at the pages," I used to tell my students. "Become the characters. Live inside the book.

Wally Lamb

#98. So you need hardly spell me how every word will be bound over to carry three score and ten toptypsical readings throughout the book of Doublends Jined.

James Joyce

#99. Ignoring me, he read the title of the book I kept firmly between our gazes. "Lover awakened. " He nestled his head on my shoulder. "Weren't you reading this book last month? "
"No."
He raised a brow.
"Yes. I can't stop. I've read it twenty-seven times in a row.

Darynda Jones

#100. Nick chided a censor, who wished some books gone, and suggested she scan Fahrenheit 451. For the book-budget cutters, Old Claus had no plan, cause if they could read, they just read Ayn Rand.

David Davis