Book Quotes

"I think Americans like the practical; they like the human. And I like both those things myself, and I try and put them into my books"

John Keegan, Historian

"I didn't want it to be a book that made pronouncements"

Penelope Lively, Author

"Conventional forms of narrative allow for different points of view, but for this book I wanted a structure whereby each of the main characters contributed a distinctive version of the story"

Penelope Lively, Author

"The writer I feel the most affinity with - you said you felt my books are 19th century novels, I think they're 18th century novels - is Fielding, Henry Fielding, he's the guy who does it for me"

Jonathan Coe, Novelist

"The biggest markets for my books outside the UK are France and Italy, and those are the two countries where I also have the closest personal relationships with my translators - I don't know whether that's a coincidence, or if there's something to be learned from it"

Jonathan Coe, Novelist

"Great dislike to the Bible was shown by those who conversed with me about it, and several have remarked to me, at different times, that if it were not for that book, Catholics would never be led to renounce their own faith"

Maria Monk, Celebrity

"Finishing a good book is like leaving a good friend"

William Feather, Author

"Books open your mind, broaden your mind, and strengthen you as nothing else can"

William Feather, Author

"I think I settled on the title before I ever wrote the book"

Frank McCourt, Author

"First of all there is always that artistic challenge of creating something. Or the particular experience to take slum life in that period and make something out of it in the form of a book. And then I felt some kind of responsibility to my family"

Frank McCourt, Author

"There's always pressure, a great deal of pressure, when writing, since my first books were so successful"

Nicholas Sparks, Author

"Whatever the practical value of the Walden experiment may be, there is no question that the book is one of the most vital and pithy ever written"

Edward Carpenter, Activist

"So, I am independently well-off and don't have to do anything, but I still do. I write books, lecture around the world, work with scientists and governments"

Uri Geller, Entertainer

"I've had a tough time with Pynchon. I liked him very much when I first read him. I liked him less with each book. He got denser and more complex in a way that didn't really pay off"

Leslie Fiedler, Critic

"I'd really like to write a book about Timothy McVeigh, but it would only work if he cooperated"

Elizabeth Wurtzel, Writer

"The future? Like unwritten books and unborn children, you don't talk about it"

Dietrich Fischer-Dieskau, Musician

"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"

Paul Kane, Writer

"For English assignments I was constantly coming up with these strange adventure stories... But I actually wanted to be an artist, or maybe work in the comic book industry"

Paul Kane, Writer

"Because I'm such a creative person, and I've always got my nose in a book, I suppose it was only a matter of time before non-fiction turned into fiction again. But I never consciously set out to become a writer and I never thought I'd be doing the things I'm doing today"

Paul Kane, Writer

"I've never written a book before"

Keith Emerson, Musician

"What I think happens, and that you have to acknowledge though, is that a director uses a book as a launching pad for his own work and that's always very flattering"

Katherine Dunn, Novelist

"But a girl of seventeen is not always thinking of books, especially in the Oxford summer term"

Mary A. Ward

"I wrote the book in my head when I was 6 years old"

Steven Cojocaru, Critic

"A life spent largely among books, and in the exercise of a literary profession, has very obvious drawbacks, as a subject-matter, when one comes to write about it"

Mary A. Ward

"I wrote two plotted books, got some of the fundamentals of storytelling down, then... it's sort of like taking the training wheels off, trying to write a book that's fun in the same way without relying on quite such mechanical or external beats"

Jonathan Franzen, Novelist

"It is very, very easy not to be offended by a book. You just have to shut it"

Salman Rushdie, Novelist

"Three children have become adults since a phone call with Jo Rowling, containing one small clue, persuaded me that there was more to Snape than an unchanging costume, and that even though only three of the books were out at that time, she held the entire massive but delicate narrative in the surest of hands"

Alan Rickman, Actor

"Who knows for what we live, and struggle, and die? Wise men write many books, in words too hard to understand. But this, the purpose of our lives, the end of all our struggle, is beyond all human wisdom"

Alan Paton, Novelist

"I think the market is always going to be around. The goal is not to say, let's get rid of the market, because the market does render a huge number of services, and I don't want to have a fight about the price of something every time I buy a book or a bottle of water"

Susan George, Activist

"We are forced by the major publishers to include electronic rights in the contracts we make with publishers for new books. And there's very little we can do about that"

Richard Curtis, Writer

"I do send out information about my books. Very few people buy the books that way, but I always feel that if they want to know more about the process, they can get the information from my books"

Richard Curtis, Writer

"The comments I most appreciate come from ordinary readers who've happened on one of my books at some time of stress in their lives, and who actually credit the book with helping them through a bad time. It's happened a few times in forty years"

Fred Saberhagen, Author

"I would never write realistic prose. I don't like people who try to write in a poetic style, but in the course of their book abandon it for realism, and weave back and forth like drunkards between the surreal and the real"

Marguerite Young, Author

"A good writer cannot avoid having social consciousness. I don't mean this about small pieces of writing, but about a big book. If it's a big book, there has to be more than one undertow"

Marguerite Young, Author

"The White House used to belong to the American people. At least that's what I learned from history books and from covering every president starting with John F. Kennedy"

Helen Thomas, Journalist

"I thought I would keep the first name Susan and change the last name but I picked up this book and as I opened it the lead character in it was called Morgan Brittany"

Morgan Brittany, Actress

"I love to read. I love to stretch. In the morning, I get up, and if I'm not in a hurry, I will lie on the floor on a rug, look through some books and magazines, and maybe listen to music and try to do stretching exercises to tune up"

Jackson Browne, Musician

"The more books we read, the clearer it becomes that the true function of a writer is to produce a masterpiece and that no other task is of any consequence"

Cyril Connolly, Journalist

"No one over thirty-five is worth meeting who has not something to teach us, - something more than we could learn for ourselves, from a book"

Cyril Connolly, Journalist

"The Swords were still interesting but by then a cast of characters had started to appear and go on from book to book, and other things about the world began to feel constricting. And there were other things I wanted to do, so I closed the series up and stopped it"

Fred Saberhagen, Author

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