books quotes

And when I was young, my family was perfectly nice. I write a lot about it, as you noticed. But it was rather limited. I think, I don’t think anyone in my family would really feel I’d done them an injustice by saying that. We didn’t see many people. There were many books. It was as if I wanted to get away from home.

I cannot live without books.

I don’t know if she should worry too much, I mean some of our greatest writers have had movies made of their books, lots of Hemingway novels were turned into movies, it doesn’t hurt the book.

Some books leave us free and some books make us free.

I don’t read books much.

Nature and books belong to the eyes that see them.

No book includes the entire world. It’s limited. And so it doesn’t seem like an aesthetic compromise to have to do that. There’s so much other material to write about.

You see the film, you might be entertained, and if it’s not a great film, it loses its power very quickly. I think even simply acceptable books stay with us a lot longer.

There is a soak-the-rich attitude in the air, a feeling that if you have a lot of money you must have got it by some ghastly means. I can quite happily say there was never any family money. All the money we got was mine, just from writing books.

I never experiment with anything in my books. Experimentation means you don’t know what you’re doing.

I like writing. I get cranky when I can’t. Yes, I write books back to back, and I work very hard on them.

The book that convinced me I wanted to be a writer was ‚Crime and Punishment‘. I put the thing down after reading it in a fever over two or three days… I said, ‚If this is what a book can be, then that is what I want to do.‘

Books constitute capital. A library book lasts as long as a house, for hundreds of years. It is not, then, an article of mere consumption but fairly of capital, and often in the case of professional men, setting out in life, it is their only capital.

I haven’t read Horowitz. I didn’t used to read him when he was a Stalinist, and I don’t read him today.

I don’t mind saying, you know, that I don’t take a salary from the church, and God has blessed me with more money than I could imagine from my books.

I love story songs because I’ve always loved books.

You can’t die with an unfinished book.

Every book is a quotation; and every house is a quotation out of all forests, and mines, and stone quarries; and every man is a quotation from all his ancestors.

Nine-tenths of the existing books are nonsense and the clever books are the refutation of that nonsense.

When you pick up a book, everyone knows it’s imaginary. You don’t have to pretend it’s not a book. We don’t have to pretend that people don’t write books. That omniscient third-person narration isn’t the only way to do it. Once you’re writing in the first person, then the narrator is a writer.

My dear wife has, I would say, probably never opened a religious book, and seems to be one of those people to whom the whole idea is utterly remote and absurd.

There is no author whose books I look forward to more than Vaclav Smil.

I am 55 years old now. It takes three years to write one book. I don’t know how many books I will be able to write before I die. It is like a countdown. So with each book I am praying – please let me live until I am finished.

I don’t mind saying, you know, that I don’t take a salary from the church, and God has blessed me with more money than I could imagine from my books. It’s been printed all over, so I don’t feel like I am hiding anything.

I don’t know how many good books I still have in me; I hope there are another four or five.

Books are like a mirror. If an ass looks in, you can’t expect an angel to look out.

Whether I’m at the office, at home, or on the road, I always have a stack of books I’m looking forward to reading.

Read the best books first, or you may not have a chance to read them at all.

The best books… are those that tell you what you know already.

I don’t write the books. God writes the books and delivers the speeches.

Each age, it is found, must write its own books; or rather, each generation for the next succeeding.

My priority is my books, at least at this point. What I have to do is write the narrative of this time.

You don’t have to burn books to destroy a culture. Just get people to stop reading them.

For a person who grew up in the ’30s and ’40s in the segregated South, with so many doors closed without explanation to me, libraries and books said, ‚Here I am, read me.‘ Over time I have learned I am at my best around books.

Many people tell me that they don ‚t know what to feel when they finish one of my books because the story was dark, or complicated, or strange. But while they were reading it, they were inside my world and they were happy. That’s good.

Censorship ends in logical completeness when nobody is allowed to read any books except the books that nobody reads.

I am a writer of books in retrospect. I talk in order to understand; I teach in order to learn.

Outside of a dog, a book is a man’s best friend. Inside of a dog it’s too dark to read.

What do we, as a nation, care about books? How much do you think we spend altogether on our libraries, public or private, as compared with what we spend on our horses?

An author who speaks about their own books is almost as bad as a mother who speaks about her own children.

Our generation in the west was lucky: we had readymade gateways. We had books, paper, teachers, schools and libraries. But many in the world lack these luxuries. How do you practice without such tryout venues?

Everywhere I go, the kids call me ‚the book lady.‘ The older I get, the more appreciative I seem to be of the ‚book lady‘ title. It makes me feel more like a legitimate person, not just a singer or an entertainer. But it makes me feel like I’ve done something good with my life and with my success.

When I was a kid, I read the science-fiction shelves, and I read the fantasy shelves.

I had no ambition to be a writer because the books I read were too good, my standards were too high.

I write books back to back, and I work very hard on them.

For a highly motivated learner, it’s not like knowledge is secret and somehow the Internet made it not secret. It just made knowledge easy to find. If you’re a motivated enough learner, books are pretty good.

I have a big following among the biogeeks of this world. Nobody ever puts them in books.

There are worse crimes than burning books. One of them is not reading them.

As far as I’m concerned, I’m a writer who’s writing books, and therefore, I don’t want to die. You’d miss the end of the book wouldn’t you? You can’t die with an unfinished book.

You see, the interesting thing about books, as opposed, say, to films, is that it’s always just one person encountering the book, it’s not an audience, it’s one to one.

I went to an extreme for literary purposes because I felt all the self-help books out there were so gooey and Pollyanna-ish and nauseating. It was making me angry.

Writers and books are cheap dates, especially when you compare the cost of a book with a ticket to the opera – or an NHL game.

O Day of days when we can read! The reader and the book, either without the other is naught.

The book is not really the container for the book. The book itself is the narrative. It’s the thing that people create.

A truly good book teaches me better than to read it. I must soon lay it down, and commence living on its hint. What I began by reading, I must finish by acting.

I read the ‚Old Testament‘ all the way through when I was about 13 and was horrified. A few months afterwards I read ‚The Origin Of Species‘, hallucinating very mildly because I was in bed with flu at the time. Despite that, or because of that, it all made perfect sense.

I never thought, in my lifetime, that you’d be able to watch movies, read books and listen to music from a phone, but I guess the technology of tomorrow is here today.

The best book, like the best speech, will do it all – make us laugh, think, cry and cheer – preferably in that order.

Books that you carry to the fire, and hold readily in your hand, are most useful after all.

The key thing about a book is that you lose yourself in the author’s world.