Book Quotes

"Publishing is a very mysterious business. It is hard to predict what kind of sale or reception a book will have, and advertising seems to do very little good"

Thomas Wolfe, Novelist

"Many women have told me they remember where they were when they read the book, and how they felt suddenly that what they really thought or felt about things made sense"

Carol Gilligan, Psychologist

"Even when I was in school shows, in elementary school doing plays, I'd always go off book and start improvising"

Billy Crystal, Comedian

"You know, I think I did originally have some sort of idea of maybe a Where Eagles Dare kind of mission against impossible odds, but it really sort of died before I had a chance to really go anywhere with it, and then just doing the book was out of the question"

Garth Ennis, Writer

"My introduction to the Brady book was an attempt to nail the exact same idea since Brady addressed the point. And since I write pornography, naturally, something of an obsession for me"

Peter Sotos, Writer

"Most of my books have caused distribution and printing problems in the past"

Peter Sotos, Writer

"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"

Peter Sotos, Writer

"The crime of book purging is that it involves a rejection of the word. For the word is never absolute truth, but only man's frail and human effort to approach the truth. To reject the word is to reject the human search"

Max Lerner, Journalist

"I understand that when people read my books that there's something there - but I don't identify with it"

Kathy Acker, Activist

"If I could go back in time and tell my younger self that eventually that I'd become very successful writing Dune books after Frank Herbert's death, I would have laughed myself silly, I think, at how strange that prospect would be"

Kevin J. Anderson, Author

"A book is always a dialogue with other readers and other books"

Tim O'Reilly

"The reason a writer writes a book is to forget a book and the reason a reader reads one is to remember it"

Thomas Wolfe, Novelist

"Well, I don't know. It's long, it's longer than both of the other books put together, so it's more ambitious. I think I get under the skin of the people a lot more than in the other books"

Cory Doctorow, Journalist

"I had this really great amazing thing happen where I almost finished the book and I really needed to come up with an ending and I decided to go back and re-read the book and see if I could come up with an ending"

Cory Doctorow, Journalist

"First you wonder if they're separate stories, but no, they're not, they're contingent stories and they form a pattern. And you begin with some of the island as the place to which the heroine of the book returns"

Robert Creeley, Poet

"How long it takes to write a book depends on its length"

Walter Jon Williams, Writer

"She's an amazing dog and really inspired everything that's in this book"

Gloria Estefan, Musician

"I'm a collecting maniac and I buy a lot of books and records. I have over thousand cds"

Ville Valo, Musician

"My book collection is primarily in America, since that's where I've lived most of my life"

Terri Windling, Artist

"Any kid who has two parents who are interested in him and has a houseful of books isn't poor"

Sam Levenson, Author

"This book that I just wrote is going to be coming out very soon to Australia"

Ronald Biggs, Celebrity

"Well you know I've been fan of Tony Hillerman's books for years"

Keith Carradine, Actor

"The thing about rigging is, you can learn it if you become a master rigger but there's no book on rigging"

Richard Serra, Sculptor

"I want to write such things as compel the admiring acclamation of the world at large, such things as are written but once in years, things subtle but distinctly different from the books written every day"

Mary MacLane, Writer

"I have been writing for 50 years and readers still read my first book from when I was in the Marine Corps"

Leon Uris, Writer

"Observation more than books and experience more than persons, are the prime educators"

Amos Bronson Alcott, Educator

"The book of Revelation is written largely in symbols"

Joseph Franklin Rutherford, Clergyman

"When I found the book was condemned as soon as the book was printed, or rather as soon as it was set up ready to print, I held it in plates for a year nearly, waiting to see what would come out of all this discussion"

John Harvey Kellogg, Businessman

"To study the phenomena of disease without books is to sail an uncharted sea, while to study books without patients is not to go to sea at all"

William Osler, Scientist

"It is much simpler to buy books than to read them and easier to read them than to absorb their contents"

William Osler, Scientist

"After I left the convent, for 15 years I was worn out with religion, I wanted nothing whatever to do with it. I felt disgusted with it. If I saw someone reading a religious book on a train, I'd think, how awful"

Karen Armstrong, Writer

"I enjoy about 1 out of 100 movies, it's about the same proportion to books published that I care to read"

Jim Harrison, Writer

"I don't think I've ever read an old book through from start to finish. Not after more than six months after writing it, that is"

Nicholas Mosley, Novelist

"It wasn't conscious, but I guess that one book is the reaction to the other. The first is so imprisoned in a male point-of-view, and the second is a point-of-view that can go anywhere it wants"

Jeffrey Eugenides, Novelist

"I always do book signings with the same blue pen. That way, if I add a personalised message to a book I've already signed, it'll be in the same colour as my signature"

John Grisham, Writer

"I didn't want to write a book. They made me do it"

Grace Slick, Musician

"We probably put about four or five comic books out a year and probably about two or three art books and various trade paperbacks - maybe four or five of those a year - and that's what we do now"

Glenn Danzig, Musician

"I first began to read religious books at school, and especially the Bible, when I was eleven years old; and almost immediately commenced a habit of secret prayer"

Francis W. Newman, Writer

"I don't publish the books to make money, not at all"

Peter Sotos, Writer

"At the moment, I'm toying with a new idea for a book, but fully engaged with writing screenplays, so the book idea - which needs empty space in my head - is barely formed yet"

Rose Tremain, Novelist

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