Book Quotes

"I still do some inking here and there and I've actually got a book that I'm going to ink entirely"

"Hardcover books are fairly expensive these days and to read one requires a significant commitment of time in our busy society. So I want to make sure that when readers buy one of my books they get something they're familiar with"

Jeffery Deaver, Writer

"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

"In other words, the people who populate my books are more than caricatures"

Jeffery Deaver, Writer

"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

"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

"One of the things I have tried to do with this book and with all of them really is avoid that simple, easy, reductionist view of motivation and to show we do things for a complex net of reasons, a real braid of reasons"

Russell Banks, 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

"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

"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

"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

"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

"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

"Well yes so far, I was recently in Germany and they had me do six book signings a day and that was too much so I had them cut it down to about three. It becomes taxing at times but its a lot of fun and you meet a lot of nice people"

Larry Hagman, Actor

"Mountains were once my big adventure but is is over since a long time; I still dream from the wonderful days sometimes, read also a few pages from a mountain book. But the thought of doing again active mountain climbing has faded"

Fritz Zwicky, Scientist

"Also, if nothing else, writing this book has really changed the way I experience bookstores. I have a whole different appreciation for the amount of work packed into even the slimmest volume on the shelves"

Jesse James Garrett, Businessman

"Quite often somebody will say, What year do your books take place? and the only answer I can give is, In childhood"

Beverly Cleary, Author

"There are good books and there are bad books, period, that's the distinction"

Norton Juster, Architect

"The aphorism in which I am the first master among Germans, are the forms of "eternity"; my ambition is to say in ten sentences what everyone else says in a book - what everyone else does not say in a book"

Friedrich Nietzsche, Philosopher

"There is no such thing as a moral or an immoral book. Books are well written, or badly written"

Oscar Wilde, Dramatist

"And this, our life, exempt from public haunt, finds tongues in trees, books in the running brooks, sermons in stones, and good in everything"

William Shakespeare, Dramatist

"Learning hath gained most by those books by which the printers have lost"

Thomas Fuller, Clergyman

"The instruction we find in books is like fire. We fetch it from our neighbours, kindle it at home, communicate it to others, and it becomes the property of all"

Voltaire, Writer

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