Book Quotes

"I spent three days a week for 10 years educating myself in the public library, and it's better than college. People should educate themselves - you can get a complete education for no money. At the end of 10 years, I had read every book in the library and I'd written a thousand stories"

Ray Bradbury, Writer

"Given Pounds and five years, and an ordinary man can in the ordinary course, without any undue haste or putting any pressure upon his taste, surround himself with books, all in his own language, and thence forward have at least one place in the world"

Augustine Birrell, Author

"Other people, including me, have written books with main characters who were old and rich. Or old and brilliant. Old sages, old wizards, old rich people"

Elizabeth Moon, Author

"A couple of weeks after that, Zebra Books phoned with an offer, and I accepted"

George Stephen, Businessman

"We had literary references, so we knew what we were talking about. We could quote things, talk about books we'd read; you can say something, you don't have to explain it"

Kevin Ayers, Composer

"One of the most beautiful passages of Rousseau is that in the sixth book of Confessions, where he describes the awakening in him of the literary sense. Of such wisdom, the poetic passion, the desire of beauty, the love of art for its own sake, has most"

Walter Pater, Critic

"I remember once I read a book on mental illness and there was a nurse that had gotten sick. Do you know what she died from? From worrying about the mental patients not being able to get their food. She became a mental patient"

Ornette Coleman, Musician

"But for me, being an editor I've been an editor of all kinds of books being an editor of poetry has been the way in which I could give a crucial part of my time to what I love most"

Peter Davison, Actor

"All TV can do is capture the spirit of a book because the medium is so utterly different. But I'm very grateful for the readers that Masterpiece Theatre has undoubtedly brought me"

Joanna Trollope, Novelist

"Of all the ways of acquiring books, writing them oneself is regarded as the most praiseworthy method. Writers are really people who write books not because they are poor, but because they are dissatisfied with the books which they could buy but do not like"

Walter Benjamin, Critic

"You buy any book on color theory today, and it's just complete poppycock. Everybody comes out of school painting pink, purple and green. The whole damn cartoon industry has pink purple and green on their mind"

John Kricfalusi, Artist

"Having reached the halfway mark in the alphabet, my prime focus is on writing each new book as well as I can"

Sue Grafton, Novelist

"Each book has been different and has been challenging in its own way to write"

Jean M. Auel, Writer

"I think for anybody reading the book they're going to get an idea in their heads of all those characters, and I think that once that gets fixed, it's quite hard to shake"

Hugh Dancy, Actor

"Normally, I could hit hard enough, as anyone who studied my fights might have known. But the impression was that I was essentially defensive, the very reverse of a killer, the prize fighter who read books, even Shakespeare"

Gene Tunney, Athlete

"Because they feel that without them telling you to do this, you wouldn't have had the characters that you have, you wouldn't have the book that you have"

Dan DeCarlo, Cartoonist

"When I die there may be a paragraph or two in the newspapers. My name will linger in the British Museum Reading Room catalogue for a space at the head of a long list of books for which no one will ever ask"

C. S. Forester, Novelist

"The whole story of the comfort women, the system of forced sexual slavery, the medical experiments of Unit 731, is not something that is in the US psyche. That is changing because many books are coming out"

Iris Chang, Historian

"All the ills of mankind, all the tragic misfortunes that fill the history books, all the political blunders, all the failures of the great leaders have arisen merely from a lack of skill at dancing"

Moliere, Playwright

"My mum was never too keen on TV, so we kids all went to the library and got books out. Right from the start, I loved the works of Mark Twain. Every time I read about Tom Sawyer, I'd go out and do something low-level naughty, just like him"

John Grisham, Writer

"As the books grew bigger and more ambitious, the situations in question sometimes became political ones, and so it became necessary to start painting in the social background on a scale which eventually became panoramic"

Jonathan Coe, Novelist

"Going out in Paris was like going out in the '30s dressed like the Andrews Sisters. It was everything I'd seen in books at my grandparents' house, only it was our generation"

Christian Lacroix, Designer

"Webster and I are very aloof. The two of us go and sit there by ourselves. I sit by myself in the corner with my book and the newspaper. He kind of runs around a little bit, and then he goes and sits on top of the picnic table. He never plays with other little dogs"

Calista Flockhart, Actress

"I began thinking there should be an American phrase book, 'cause I've got an Italian phrase book, and an Arabic one... now a British one. I think it'd be pretty good to have an American phrase book"

Joe Strummer, Musician

"And, uh, I've got about six thousand cartoons up there, also books and papers"

Rube Goldberg, Cartoonist

"I think I learned a lot from reading in general - even from reading badly written books"

Margaret Haddix, Author

"I really want to do a book on the history of the no-wave music scene in New York, how it extended out and formed lots of other things. It was such a great visual culture"

Thurston Moore, Musician

"When I and the other young artists were working in comics, our work carried with it a particularly American slant. After all, we were Americans drawing and writing about things that touched us. As it turned out, the early work was, you might say, a comic book version of Jazz"

Joe Simon

"He who studies medicine without books sails an uncharted sea, but he who studies medicine without patients does not go to sea at all"

William Osler, Scientist

"The book has many different characteristics: some are extremely old-fashioned storytelling traits, but there are also a fair number of postmodern traits, and the self-consciousness is one"

Jeffrey Eugenides, Novelist

"You want a story? Read 'Gone With the Wind'. These aren't stories. They're joke books. The whole thing of a beginning, a middle and an end has been done to death"

Brian P. Cleary, Author

"My dream was to be known as a writer and to be able to produce at least one book that would be read by people. That dream came true with the publication of my first novel - and all the rest has been a sweet bonus"

Robert Cormier, Author

"Books give not wisdom where none was before. But where some is, there reading makes it more"

Elizabeth Hardwick, Critic

"I never buy magazines, I never even buy books"

Marc Newson, Designer

"I have written about 10 books, all just practical encouragement for moms"

Lisa Whelchel, Actor

"Henry Miller wrote novels, but he calls his protagonist Henry, often Henry Miller, and his books are in this gray area between memoir and novel"

Leslie Fiedler, Critic

"I read the book with interest, but when Jackson was a candidate in 1828 for the Presidency, I opposed him and voted for Adams. I favored a protective tariff"

Ezra Cornell, Businessman

"I read over a hundred books a year and have done so since I was fifteen years old, and every book I've read has taught me something"

Nicholas Sparks, Author

"One, I have a wonderful publisher, Black Sparrow Press; as long as they exist, they will keep me in print. And they claim they sell very respectable numbers of my books, so I guess, and it's true, every place I go, my books are in libraries and on bookshelves"

Diane Wakoski, Poet

"As an actor, the biggest compliment you can get, in my book is for someone to believe that you're the character"

Matt LeBlanc, Actor

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