Book Quotations | Page 2

The most terrifying thing I can think of is being alone - and I mean utterly alone, like no one else in the world alone - at night. That's the nucleus of the first story in my collection and it's also where the title came from for the book.

The Sistine Chapel is an extraordinary work of education - it lays out all the early books of the Bible.

There is a very definite Russian heart in me; that never dies. I think you're born and you live your life with it and you die with it. I'm very much an American - my books tend to be about American things, but inside there's that sort of tortured, long-suffering, aching, constantly analysing Russian soul underneath the happy American exterior.

Even tiny children looking at a picture book are using their imaginations, gleaning clues from the images to understand what is happening, and perhaps using the throwaway details which the illustrator includes to add their own elements to the story.

And books that were published in much larger numbers than Selfish, Little are hard to find. And publishers who wanted to publish my last few works have them stuck in limbo while new distribution ideas and legal issues and fears are blown away.

Art needs to be socialised, and you need a lot of context to understand that, and that doesn't mean having read a few art history books.

Whites were the winners, blacks were the losers, we wrote the history books, and they didn't feature.

Books, I don't know what you see in them. I can understand a person reading them, but I can't for the life of me see why people have to write them.

One of the characteristics I cherish in my friends is their childlike gullibility, and several excited minutes were spent trying to actually find this book.

I get asked to read new works a lot, in the hope that I will give a quotation and I will only give a 'puff' for a book I truly love.

The only book worth writing is the book that threatens to kill you.

I have to go make books. Sorry about that.

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.

Books themselves need no defense. Their spokesmen come and go, their readers live and die, they remain constant.

Humor is the oxygen of children's literature. There's a lot of competition for children's time, but even kids who hate to read want to read a funny book.

It was the biggest suppression of voting rights in our country's history since Jim Crow. And the thread of race runs from the beginning to the end of my book.

As a pastor and as a dad, I want my son to know I tell the truth. He can read the book. He knows if I exaggerated or if I didn't. My son is forever gonna believe that I'm an honest person or I'm a liar by what I wrote in that book, because he can read.

It is not true that we have only one life to live; if we can read, we can live as many more lives and as many kinds of lives as we wish.

I don't really have a domestic inclination. Even my apartment has a semblance of a storage facility. It's just stacks, there are no bookshelves, just books and piles of stamp collections and weird little sewing and knitting projects.

At hotels, you are an actress. Absolutely. You can do what you want. Go where you want. I love my home too. But I love to arrive in a hotel. They have books, chocolate, food. I put things in the little refrigerator.

I don't like drawing characters facing right. If I tried to do that at a book signing, I'd have to pencil it first.

If you really want to know yourself, start by writing a book.

I got interested in the question of literacy because writers are always moaning about why more people don't read books. They long for the good old days when people read serious novels.

A book may be compared to your neighbor: if it be good, it cannot last too long; if bad, you cannot get rid of it too early.

I lived in upstate New York until I was ten years old and we moved overseas. I have a lot of nostalgic memories of that part of the world, and I love going back there by writing the Lakeshore books.

Thus we hope to teach mythology not as a study, but as a relaxation from study; to give our work the charm of a story-book, yet by means of it to impart a knowledge of an important branch of education.

One was a book I read by Mahatma Gandhi. In it was a passage where he said that religion, the pursuing of the inner journey, should not be separated from the pursuing of the outer and social journey, because we are not isolated beings.

He that loves reading has everything within his reach.

I've always liked getting away with just a little bit of what you're not supposed to. Like my first book, Billy's Booger, got me in trouble with the principal's office.

I'm a bachelor in the old sense of the word, meaning I flirt, I have very many close relationships, but then I come home and like to read my book.

People say I don't write books, I make Christmas presents.

I feel like every time I start up, it's like a truck you have to get into 15th gear, so you very solely crank into that mental space where you feel really immersed in the world of the book and then you can just kind of go.

Old books that have ceased to be of service should no more be abandoned than should old friends who have ceased to give pleasure.

Easy is to occupy a place in a telephone book. Difficult is to occupy someone's heart; know that you're really loved.

As an author, you can't expect a movie to be an illustration of the book. If that's what you hope for, you shouldn't sell the rights.

I love books. I read voraciously, and I happened to have been fortunate to have been in the right place at the right time.

My career is an open book, but my life is not

No two persons ever read the same book.

Wear the old coat and buy the new book.

I believe that it is my job not only to write books but to have them published. A book is like a child. You have to defend the life of a child.

Maybe I would have become an actor. I was a very outgoing kid, but being in the hospital - being outside of social action for so long - turned me into an observer. Actually, right after I got out of the hospital, I did start writing a novel, but the book was so transparently about me that I stopped.

Now my only income is a few royalty cheques from my books.

Confucianism is all about tempering your instincts with intellectual discipline, with book learning.

It's funny - my wife is more jealous of my books than of other women because I'm always working and thinking about my books.

There are those who believe that the value of a children's book can be measured only in terms of the moral lessons it tries to impose or the perfect role models it offers. Personally, I happen to think that a book is of extraordinary value if it gives the reader nothing more than a smile or two. In fact, I happen to think that's huge.

I do, however, think it would be difficult to write books I don't like to read.

I confess I didn't read the 'Green Arrow' comics before coming to play Shado. The comic books are not as easily accessible in Hong Kong as they are in the States. I do enjoy superhero fiction, though.

I never write in a linear way. And I tell students not to. You can only know so much about a book when you first start.

A book is still atemporal. It is you, in silence, hearing voices in your head, unfolding at a time that has nothing to do with the timescale of reading. And for the hours that we retreat into this moratorium, with the last form of private and silent human activity that isn't considered pathological, we are outside of time.

Writing a children's book means you cannot spin out long narratives or have complex character development.

I lived in the Republic of Ireland. I wrote a book about the North but as an outsider. The hatreds there were not mine. I never felt them. I liked how open in most ways Catalan nationalism was, compared to Irish nationalism. I disliked the violence and cruelty in Ireland.

'Big Sky Mountain' is the story of Hutch Carmody and Kendra Shepherd, lovers with a history, and a lot of hurt pride. The book is about finding their way back to each other, growing as people, and inventing a life they can share.

In the university library, we know when a book has been used in a class or put on reserve... or while it was out, did somebody call it back in. It turns out to be a pretty good indicator of how relevant the work is at that time.

When I came back to Washington to be The Times' chief congressional correspondent in 1991, I was looking for a book subject, and Ted Kennedy stood out for two reasons.

Cooking is great, love is grand, but souffles fall and lovers come and go. But you can always depend on a book!

Have you ever heard the expression: Walk a mile in my shoes, and then judge me? And write your own books.

What's interesting about books that take place in the future, even twenty years in the future, is that many of them are black or white: It's either a utopia or it's misery. The real truth is that there's going to be both things in any future, just like there is now.

I've made mistakes, I've misspoke, I am sure I will again sometime, but that happens, that's part of being human in my book. I'm OK with that. I've never done it maliciously, ever.

A lot of people write books not at the end of their career. Why you gotta wait until then? When you're momentum's going, that's when people really want to get to know about you.

I look for two things when I am about to launch into a book. First, there has to be a dramatic arc to the story itself that will carry me, and the reader, from beginning to end. Second, the story has to weave through larger themes that can illuminate the world of the subject.

I doubt I'll ever do another book collaboration; I've been spoiled. Roger and I both happened to move to New Mexico at about the same time, when we each had a family of young kids to raise. Socializing seemed to lead naturally to working together.

It's all about people. It's about networking and being nice to people and not burning any bridges. Your book is going to impress, but in the end it is people that are going to hire you.

I'm a people person, very approachable. I go out every night, tons of functions. I love all facets of this industry... Music, film, TV, books, art. I love being around creative people.

I just like the comic book sensibility. If I can turn them into films and TV series, that's just icing on the cake.

Books are only the shadow and life the real thing. I believe this as strongly as any belief I hold.

I am not afraid that the book will be controversial, I'm afraid it will not be controversial.

Publishing the lyric books, poetry or comics of other musicians I know. That's the thing I really want to break into!

Well, there's nothing better than putting your feet up on a Sunday afternoon and grabbing a good book.

The craft of writing is all the stuff that you can learn through school; go to workshops and read books. Learn characterization, plot and dialogue and pacing and word choice and point of view. Then there's also the art of it which is sort of the unknown, the inspiration, the stuff that is noncerebral.

What irritates me is the bland way people go around saying, 'Oh, our attitude has changed. We don't dislike these people any more.' But by the strangest coincidence, they haven't taken away the injustice; the laws are still on the books.

Literary imagination is an aesthetic object offered by a writer to a lover of books.

Autobiography is probably the most respectable form of lying.

After the children grew up, I began to focus on my writing. My first books were part of a trilogy... The 'Wind Dance' trilogy.

A book, like a landscape, is a state of consciousness varying with readers.

I'm not the best actor I can be, so I'm just working on it. I'm not the quickest reader in the world but when I get an acting book I can read it in two days.

Other writers definitely influence my writing. What encourages me and inspires me is when I read a good book. It makes me want to be a better writer.

I've given up reading books. I find it takes my mind off myself.

I have said repeatedly that in this country we track library books better than we do sex offenders.

I used to feel defensive when people would say, 'Yes, but your books have happy endings', as if that made them worthless, or unrealistic. Some people do get happy endings, even if it's only for a while. I would rather never be published again than write a downbeat ending.

I used to get a haircut every Saturday so I would never miss any of the comic books. I had practically no hair when I was a kid!

The first four months of writing the book, my mental image is scratching with my hands through granite. My other image is pushing a train up the mountain, and it's icy, and I'm in bare feet.

Reading a hard copy book, and reading a book on an iPad are slightly different experiences. What they both have in common though is that you must engage your imagination in the process.

Every year the literary press praises dozens if not hundreds of novels to the skies, asserting explicitly or implicitly that these books will probably not be suffering water damage in the basements of their authors' houses 20 years from now. But historically, anyway, that's not the way the novelistic ecology works.

Maybe we all need to leave our children with a value legacy, and not a financial one. A value for things with a personal touch - an autographed book, a soul-searching letter.

Do you all have a living room floor or a bedroom floor? Then you can write a book.

I'm not a guy who needs to read motivation books.

I think to be writer you have to enjoy being alone. I was a loner as a teenager and was always drawn to characters in books and films who were at the fringes.

Well Ice H20 is my company that I plan to take to the next level with new artists, books, movies and so forth. It's more like a multimedia brand that I want to take to the next level and put some talented people on.

You could say, in a vulgar Freudian way, that I am the unhappy child who escapes into books. Even as a child, I was most happy being alone. This has not changed.

I book myself tight. If I have any time off, I get antsy.

The telephone book is full of facts, but it doesn't contain a single idea.

When I put magic into a book - whether it's a wizard or a crusty old werewolf - I'm asking a reader to swallow a huge leap that is counter to everything he or she knows. An extra big helping of reality makes that leap go down a lot easier.

I've been quite fascinated by the relative insignificance of human existence, the shortness of life. We might as well be a letter in a word in a sentence on a page in a book in a library in a city in one country in this enormous universe! And that kind of fear and insignificance has kept me awake at night. I feel like it must be universal. Everybody must know that somewhere.

Dialogue is the place that books are most alive and forge the most direct connection with readers. It is also where we as writers discover our characters and allow them to become real.

With a few flowers in my garden, half a dozen pictures and some books, I live without envy.

I'm a commercial writer, not an author. Margaret Mitchell was an author. She wrote one book.

To me, a book is a book, an electronic device is not, and love of books was the reason I started writing.

My heart goes out to victims and survivors of the Hurricane Katrina tragedy and to their families. This disaster will go down in history books as one of the largest natural disasters in U.S. history.

For myself, the only way I know how to make a book is to construct it like a collage: a bit of dialogue here, a scrap of narrative, an isolated description of a common object, an elaborate running metaphor which threads between the sequences and holds different narrative lines together.

Reading is such a personal thing to me. I'd much rather give someone a gift certificate to a bookstore, and let that person choose his or her own books.