Book Quotes

"Book writing is a little different because, in my case, my editor is a year younger than me and basically has the same sensibility as me"

Chuck Klosterman, Critic

"Writers are not just people who sit down and write. They hazard themselves. Every time you compose a book your composition of yourself is at stake"

E. L. Doctorow, Author

"I enjoyed doing the gag covers better than the story ones because they were usually simpler. A cover based on an incident in the plot took a great deal of staging to tell a little story that was still part of the book. And it had to make sense on its own"

Carl Barks, Artist

"In my book, I was trying to get into my own soul"

Claire Bloom, Actress

"I don't read books"

Eric Bristow, Celebrity

"Our home had many books due principally to the educational interests of my sister and two brothers, all of whom where serious students engaged in professional studies; my sister became a doctor of medicine and my brothers became lawyers"

Frederick Reines, Physicist

"What I thought we ought to try to do in a book like this is to focus closely on Lincoln, himself, to see what he knew, how he knew it, how he came to make the decisions that he did, and how he implemented them"

David Herbert Donald, Historian

"A library book, I imagine, is a happy book"

Cornelia Funke, Author

"It's just that what's important there is different there than what's important is here. Here, people care that you wrote a book or that you work in the media"

Chuck Klosterman, Critic

"My heart goes out to victims and survivors of the Hurricane Katrina tragedy and to their families. This disaster will go down in history books as one of the largest natural disasters in U.S. history"

Ellen Tauscher, Politician

"There's a moment of recognition. It's that white-light kind of stuff that just "works." I love that. And you know it when it happens, whether it's a movie, music, a building, a book"

Barbara Kruger, Artist

"Listen, my day job is also Chief Creative Officer for Marvel, and it's a very painful job because we publish a lot of books, and there are things I see where I can punch people out. Therefore, we have some new people now, and the kids are going to read our books"

Avi Arad, Businessman

"People who think my books are autobiographical, which they're not, credit me with having a much better memory than I do. I do, however, have a powerful imagination"

Curtis Sittenfeld, Writer

"Negative humor is forgotten immediately. It's the stuff that makes us feel better about our lives that lives long. Much more satisfying. Enter children's books"

Berke Breathed, Cartoonist

"Anyway, in the mid 80's I was spending a fortune buying old Golden Age books from the late 30's and 40's and I was making personal appearances at a lot of sci fi and comic book conventions all around the country here so that I could find books for my collection"

Bill Mumy, Actor

"A harsh reality of newspaper editing is that the deadlines don't allow for the polish that you expect in books or even magazines"

Bill Walsh, Editor

"One book at a time... though I'm usually doing the research for others while I'm writing, but that sort of research is fairly desultory and I like to stick to the book being written - and writing a book concentrates the mind so the research is more productive"

Bernard Cornwell, Novelist

"We may take it to be the accepted idea that the Mosaic books were not handed down to us for our instruction in scientific knowledge, and that it is our duty to ground our scientific beliefs upon observation and inference, unmixed with considerations of a different order"

Asa Gray, Scientist

"I agreed on condition that we found a completely new concept that had nothing to do with the latest books"

Bernard Pivot, Journalist

"To me a book is a message from the gods to mankind; or, if not, should never be published at all"

Aleister Crowley, Critic

"I read a book a day when I was a kid. My family was not literary; we did not have any books in the house"

Amy Tan, Novelist

"We used to root for the Indians against the cavalry, because we didn't think it was fair in the history books that when the cavalry won it was a great victory, and when the Indians won it was a massacre"

Dick Gregory, Comedian

"You know, he would go and look at different funny books because he wanted his character to be different and make different faces. I saw a funny book in his room and it looked like the same character he was playing. It was about a duck"

Bubba Smith, Athlete

"One thing that's coming up a lot is: are you as grumpy as you appear from this Black Books thing"

Dylan Moran, Comedian

"Nowadays I construct my books as if they're film scripts"

Leon de Winter, Artist

"Never read a book through merely because you have begun it"

John Witherspoon, Politician

"I really had little interest in becoming famous. When I write my book, it will be my guide to avoid becoming a rock star"

Edgar Winter, Musician

"I did the pilot, and when they came through and said they were going to put it on the air, I had already some dates in the book with my band and so on. So Barry did the first one, he may have done a few more than the first one in the series, and I took it up from then"

Humphrey Lyttelton, Musician

"You just don't give up. There have been times when everything seemed to conspire against getting a book done or printed, and I would feel like turning my back on the whole thing. But I came back and persisted"

Dee Brown, Novelist

"The whole book experience was a look into another world, the world of Gore Vidal and Norman Mailer"

Jerry Kramer, Athlete

"They want a lip print for their autograph books. I'm a sport; I go along"

Cleo Moore, Actress

"I think the book struck me in a few ways that I thought very interesting to pick it as my first martial arts film. It has a very strong female character and it was very abundant in classic Chinese textures"

Ang Lee, Director

"Magic came very easy for me when I was a kid. When I was 8 years old I started doing it, and by the time I was 12, I was already published in magic books"

David Copperfield, Celebrity

"Our life is a book that writes itself and whose principal themes sometimes escape us. We are like characters in a novel who do not always understand what the author wants of them"

Julien Green, Novelist

"I thought it must be pure science fiction. But when I checked it out I found a lot of magazine articles that actually supported the theory behind the book which was incredible. That's when I decided to acquire the rights of the book and everything went from there"

Roland Emmerich, Director

"What makes a book great, a so-called classic, it its quality of always being modern, of its author, though he be long dead, continuing to speak to each new generation"

Lawrence Clark Powell

"We tend to read each other's books in sizeable chunks as they are written. I don't know that you could say we are ruthless with each other - in fact, I suppose we are very kind. There are ways to make suggestions which are not destructive"

Jonathan Kellerman, Psychologist

"I simply went down there to catch up with an old mate of mine, who owns the place. He's the one who wrote the book on the place, but no, no movie, just a beer"

Bryan Brown, Actor

"In addition, we were unable to meet openly to discuss the progress of the book, for we were both on the list of persons banned from communicating with other banned persons"

Ruth First, Activist

"A book comes and says, "Write me." My job is to try to serve it to the best of my ability, which is never good enough, but all I can do is listen to it, do what it tells me and collaborate"

Madeleine L'Engle, Novelist

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