Book Quotes

"The telephone book is full of facts, but it doesn't contain a single idea"

"It's always hard when you're playing someone for a lot of people out there who are going to see the movie after reading the books. There's a communion between a reader and the writer, so people will have an idea who Sirius Black is and I might not be everyone's idea of that"

Gary Oldman, Actor

"The mood in which my book was conceived and executed, was in fact to some extent a passing one"

F. H. Bradley, Philosopher

"When I was a child and teenager I read whenever I had the opportunity, but since then I've found it hard to read as much as I'd like, children, work, and pets all providing powerful incentives to escape into a book and a practical reason why I rarely do so"

Louise Brown, Celebrity

"The importance and influence of books on me has been cumulative: the result of hearing and reading lots of stories about interesting people and places"

Louise Brown, Celebrity

"Master books, but do not let them master you. Read to live, not live to read"

Edward G. Bulwer-Lytton, Politician

"It took a brave editor in the U.S. to sign a contract for Dancing Girls, and without her belief in the book, I'm not sure it would ever have found its way into print"

Louise Brown, Celebrity

"I'm working on a nonfiction book on Nepal and a novel about diasporas"

Louise Brown, Celebrity

"I have a good collection of cookery books. This is not so much because I like cooking, but because I like eating"

Louise Brown, Celebrity

"I can't pick out one single book that had such a profound personal impact"

Louise Brown, Celebrity

"I bought a selection of short, romantic fiction novels, studied them, decided that I had found a formula and then wrote a book that I figured was the perfect story. Thank goodness it was rejected"

Louise Brown, Celebrity

"Don't write the book you think publishers want to commission. Plenty of other writers will be doing the same thing"

Louise Brown, Celebrity

"We Jews have a special attachment to the Book. The study of page after page in tomes yellowing with age was obligatory"

Theodore Bikel, Actor

"The books that help you the most are those which make you think the most"

Theodore Parker, Theologian

"The fear of failure is so great, it is no wonder that the desire to do right by one's children has led to a whole library of books offering advice on how to raise them"

Bruno Bettelheim, Writer

"I deliberately wrote a poem in my last book where I was suggesting that there are other passions as great as or more important than the passion of sex"

Thom Gunn, Poet

"The only other thing which I think is important is: Don't write a book or start a book with the expectation of communicating a message in a very important way"

Norton Juster, Architect

"It was really written as most, I think, books are by writers - for themselves. There was something that just had to be written, in a way that it had to be written. If you know what I mean"

Norton Juster, Architect

"I think really good books can be read by anybody"

Norton Juster, Architect

"I received a grant from The Ford Foundation to write a book for kids about urban perception, or how people experience cities, but I kept putting off writing it. Instead I started to write what became The Phantom Tollbooth"

Norton Juster, Architect

"And when I'm writing, I write a lot anyway. I might write pages and pages of conversation between characters that don't necessarily end up in the book, or in the story I'm working on, because they're simply my way of getting to know the characters"

Norton Juster, Architect

"A good book written for children can be read by adults"

Norton Juster, Architect

"However, poetry does not live solely in books or in school anthologies"

Eugenio Montale, Poet

"A great book provides escapism for me. The artistry and the creativity in a story are better than any drugs"

Wentworth Miller, Actor

"What's funny about Jesus' Son is that I never even wrote that book, I just wrote it down. I would tell these stories and people would say, You should write these things down"

Denis Johnson, Writer

"What I think is interesting is that the more you do, you have to invent a book of rules of what you can do and what you can't do. And the very real danger is that if your book of rules becomes a book of cliches"

Adrian Lyne, Director

"Books were my pass to personal freedom. I learned to read at age three, and soon discovered there was a whole world to conquer that went beyond our farm in Mississippi"

Oprah Winfrey, Entertainer

"In the case of good books, the point is not to see how many of them you can get through, but how many can get through to you"

Mortimer Adler, Philosopher

"If you never ask yourself any questions about the meaning of a passage, you cannot expect the book to give you any insight you do not already possess"

Mortimer Adler, Philosopher

"The failure to read good books both enfeebles the vision and strengthens our most fatal tendency - the belief that the here and now is all there is"

Allan Bloom, Philosopher

"We are the children of a technological age. We have found streamlined ways of doing much of our routine work. Printing is no longer the only way of reproducing books. Reading them, however, has not changed"

Lawrence Clark Powell

"We came to say, the Quran is our constitution, we are committed to God and his holy book. God willing, should they try to carry out their crime against the Quran, God will tear their state apart and they will become God's lesson to anyone who tries to desecrate the holy book"

Ismail Haniyeh, Politician

"You can learn a line from a win and a book from a defeat"

Paul Brown, Coach

"Kids just don't read any more. They spend much more time with video games. It's just hard to get kids to read anything. Book sales have dropped dramatically, too. I think 90% of the books are bought only by 5% of the US population"

Stan Sakai, Cartoonist

"Dreams are illustrations... from the book your soul is writing about you"

Marsha Norman, Dramatist

"I don't like Communism because it hands out wealth through rationing books"

Omar Torrijos Herrera, Soldier

"It's true that I have spoken about doing a book before, but then everyone you speak to is planning to write a book"

Dylan Moran, Comedian

"Black Books adheres to a more old fashioned, traditional sitcom format, which I think works, because in its own way, it's quite theatrical"

Dylan Moran, Comedian

"A gold book, fastened together in the shape of a book by wires of the same metal, had been dug up in the northern part of the state of New York, and along with the book an enormous pair of gold spectacles!"

Charles Anthon, Writer

"For a dyed-in-the-wool author, nothing is as dead as a book once it is written. She is rather like a cat whose kittens have grown up"

Rumer Godden, Novelist

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