Book Quotes

"For books are more than books, they are the life, the very heart and core of ages past, the reason why men lived and worked and died, the essence and quintessence of their lives"

Gene Fowler, Journalist

"I am 55 years old now. It takes three years to write one book. I don't know how many books I will be able to write before I die. It is like a countdown. So with each book I am praying - please let me live until I am finished"

Haruki Murakami, Writer

"Lots of people want to have written; they don't want to write. In other words, they want to see their name on the front cover of a book and their grinning picture on the back. But this is what comes at the end of a job, not at the beginning"

Elizabeth George, Author

"It was an hour and a half plane ride, so I slept. I try to sleep because that's probably the only time I get to get my real sleep. When I can't sleep I read books or watch movies"

Keren Ann, Musician

"A man loses contact with reality if he is not surrounded by his books"

Francois Mitterrand, Statesman

"I basically only read books that are over 2,000 years old"

Hans-Georg Gadamer, Philosopher

"No one I know of has ever had this experience-where you had to sit and wait and wait for a DNA test to come back just so you can write the last page of the book"

Joseph Wambaugh, Writer

"I enjoy adapting my own work, or anybody's work. I like to adapt books"

Joseph Wambaugh, Writer

"I don't remember ever having finished a book"

Bridget Hall, Model

"I write reviews of science books for the Boston Globe, so I like to give science books"

Anthony Doerr, Writer

"My first book is really about heat. That book, for me, was an exploration of heat as ingredient. Why we don't talk about heat as an ingredient, I don't quite understand, because it is the common ingredient to all cooking processes"

Alton Brown, Entertainer

"There are three reasons why this book came into being. First, throughout the 33 years I've been writing recipes - although I'm not vegetarian myself - I have greatly enjoyed creating vegetarian recipes, and cooking and serving them at home"

Delia Smith, Celebrity

"The books are funny and sad, and that's what people respond to"

Paula Danziger, Author

"There's nothing that makes you so aware of the improvisation of human existence as a song unfinished. Or an old address book"

Carson McCullers, Novelist

"Some people act as though art that is for a mass audience is not good art, and I think this has been a very negative thing. I know that I have wanted very much to write books that are accessible to the widest audience possible"

Bell Hooks, Critic

"I did know Ted Hughes and I partly wrote the book to explain to myself and others the complexities of a marriage that was for six years wonderfully productive of poetry and then ended in tragedy"

Anne Stevenson, Poet

"Usually by the time I finish a book tour I've just about had it with the book"

Richard Russo, Novelist

"My books are elegiac in the sense that they're odes to a nation that even I sometimes think may not exist anymore except in my memory and my imagination"

Richard Russo, Novelist

"May I say, finally, that I have no illusions of grandeur; quite to the contrary, I am very humble in my knowledge that through forty years of my life my life has been an open book of service to my fellow architects and for the public good"

Ralph Thomas Walker, Architect

"Blake has always been a favorite, the lyrics, not so much the prophetic books, but I suppose Yeats influenced me more as a young poet, and the American, Robert Frost"

Anne Stevenson, Poet

"A writer is, after all, only half his book. The other half is the reader and from the reader the writer learns"

P. L. Travers, Writer

"Everybody writes a book too many"

Mordecai Richler, Novelist

"When I came back to Washington to be The Times' chief congressional correspondent in 1991, I was looking for a book subject, and Ted Kennedy stood out for two reasons"

Adam Clymer, Journalist

"I'd sold the book first. Actually to a paperback publisher. I had nothing. I just had the idea"

William Peter Blatty, Writer

"My writing has to support more than my research habit, but I love to curl up with a book about some dusty corner of history"

Lynn Abbey, Author

"I write sets of books, but I've also written a lot of orphans"

Lynn Abbey, Author

"But things such as 'Harry Potter', all I can do is shape my character, seek the director's approval on that, and basically take it from there. Professor Flitwick in 'Harry Potter', I kind of defined how I saw him from reading the book, and luckily that matched up with the director's vision"

Warwick Davis, Actor

"The great thing about Stephen is that he sees the movie as a separate thing, I think. He wants it to capture the essence of the book, and if he feels that's been done, then he's not too particular about the details. I think that's why he's happy"

Lawrence Kasdan, Producer

"The book shows Clinton in the presidency as a profile in growth"

Sidney Blumenthal, Journalist

"A collection of good books, with a soul to it in the shape of a librarian, becomes a vitalized power among the impulses by which the world goes on to improvement"

Justin Winsor, Writer

"The part of my writing I find the most rewarding is when people write to me or speak to me in public to tell me how his or her life has been changed by my books"

Sidney Sheldon, Novelist

"This is a much more fitting interpretation of the book than its modern interpretation"

Robert Vaughan, Author

"Alternative cartoonists have to rely on comic book stores to get their stuff in the hands of readers"

Jim Woodring, Artist

"In our fathers' time nothing was read but books of feigned chivalry, wherein a man by reading should be led to none other end, but only to manslaughter and bawdry"

Roger Ascham, Writer

"It's unbelievable, there's a book out attacking Gore, when he's the most unfortunate loser in political history"

Vincent Bugliosi, Author

"Whatever extra there is in me at any given moment isn't fully formed. I am hardly aware of it; it awaits the next book. It will - with luck - come to me during the actual writing, and it will take me by surprise"

V. S. Naipaul, Novelist

"But everything of value about me is in my books"

V. S. Naipaul, Novelist

"Serial killers are everywhere! Well, perhaps not in our neighborhood, but on our television screens, at the movie theatres, and in rows and rows of books at our local Borders or Barnes and Noble Booksellers"

Pat Brown, Entertainer

"Thank you for sending me a copy of your book - I'll waste no time reading it"

Moses Hadas, Writer

"If writers learn more from their books than do readers, perhaps I may have begun to learn"

Lloyd Alexander, Writer

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