Book Quotes

"Well, I would never admit to copying Karl Rove's play book, but there's no doubt that what the Bush people did in 2004 was impressive. They had neighbors talking to neighbors. They did a remarkable job increasing Republican turnout in states like Ohio and Florida"

David Plouffe, Public Servant

"It works in the comic book, but as the audiences have gotten older and more sophisticated, I think the stories need to grow up with them. This is a story about a couple of rival gangs and what goes wrong in a couple of days"

Todd McFarlane, Artist

"Our coach was absolutely out of his head. He must have read Bear Bryant's book. We had 78 players out. The first day 35 quit. Twenty quit the second day. We ended with 17 players. It was depressing"

Merlin Olsen, Athlete

"When I came out, and for many years afterwards, it had become a habit for me to sit and read and read and read, like an obsession. I would take 20 books, and not come out until I'd finished them. It took me a while to change that habit"

Mohsen Makhmalbaf, Director

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

Todd McFarlane, Artist

"Anyone interested in the world generally can't help being interested in young adult culture - in the music, the bands, the books, the fashions, and the way in which the young adult community develops its own language"

Margaret Mahy, Author

"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

"Generally my typical books have lots of twists and turns a big surprise ending and then usually another surprise at the end and ideally, as in Garden of Beasts, we get to the very end and we find at the last few pages that there's yet another surprise"

Jeffery Deaver, Writer

"I take refuge in my books"

Julia Ward Howe, Activist

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

Jeffery Deaver, Writer

"I have disassociated myself from that book"

Uta Hagen, Actress

"I think Maus I is better than Maus II. The standard here is whether or not it's as good as a great book of prose literature and by that standard, no, it's not that great"

Ted Rall, Cartoonist

"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

"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

"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

"The best book on programming for the layman is "Alice in Wonderland"; but that's because it's the best book on anything for the layman"

Alan Perlis, Scientist

"Today's public figures can no longer write their own speeches or books, and there is some evidence that they can't read them either"

Gore Vidal, 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

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