Book Quotes

I dont really take anything from home except some U.S. magazines and books and definitely some U.S. music. There are just certain songs that remind me of home.

A surprising number of people - including many students of literature - will tell you they haven't really lived in a book since they were children.

A new book is like a friend that I have yet to meet

The truth is we're all probably more creative than we realize, except we spend our lives watching TV or reading somebody else's book. We never pick up a brush and stand in front of our own easel.

A pioneer in this genre [ writing about the refugee crisis] : the book A Seventh Man, by the great John Berger, decades ago evoked the lives of migrant workers in Europe.

Pitches are like pages of a book; they're so important. The chess game; how I set you up early, and how I'll do it differently later.

I don't just want my books to be about the '30s and '40s. I want them to read as if they had been written then. I think of them as '40s novels, written in the conservative narrative past.

You write a lot of books; you hope you get better.

It takes me three months of research and nine months of work to produce a book. When I start writing, I do two pages a day; if I'm gonna do 320, that's 160 days.

The ability to absorb a book and make someone else's words and story your own was exactly was I was doing on stage.

You say, "Something important really happened here. I really had hold of something I was visited by the muse." And that's enough to make you continue the months and years to finish the whole book.

In our day, computer technology and the proliferation of books on CD-ROM have not affected - as far as statistics show - the production and sale of books in their old-fashioned codex form.

In books, the proportion of exceptional to commonplace people is high; in reality, very low.

I like the idea of a book being a democratic space which readers enter, carrying their own thoughts, and participate in a conversation, or experience of grace.

Even if we die at 100, we're still dying young. I want at least 700 years. There's a lot of travelling and books to read and movies to see. I'm not going to squeeze it all in in 85 years.

In my garden I spend my days, in my library I spend my nights. My interests are divided between my geraniums and my books. With the flower I am in the present; with the book I am in the past.

In my garden I spend my days; in my library I spend my nights.

It reminds me how funny living in LA can be; You go to a friend's barbecue and you leave the face of Victoria Beckham's look book.

I read a book called The Art of Loving. A lot of things seemed clear while I was reading it but afterwards I went back to being more or less the same.

I read a lot when I'm travelling and always have a couple of books on the go.

We don't simply read books. We become them.

There are no bad books any more than there are ugly women.

What is the most precious, the most exciting smell awaiting you in the house when you return to it after a dozen years or so? The smell of roses, you think? No, mouldering books.

We're taking requests from customers who are looking for certain used copies. We already found 18 to 20 Louis L'Amour books that were on a customer's request list.

No one ever writes a book in which he is the bad guy.

Reading centers on finding yourself in a book.

Every time I finish a book, it's my favorite. I have a lot of favorites. I did just finish Jane Eyre and it was fabulous. I didn't want it to end.

All of my books now come from readers' ideas.

What is written beneath this heavy handsome book cover will count, so sayeth this cover.

You have to be a lover of books without expecting more of them than they give - a little pleasure, a little insight, a moment of escape, a deepening of your own humanity. Not much else.

You know how I love talking about books, and you know how I adore receiving compliments.

I believe passionately in preemptive pessimism, especially before a book comes out. I expect the worst both from reviewers and sales, and then, with any luck, I may be proved wrong.

Keepers of books, keepers of print and paper on the shelves, librarians are keepers also of the records of the human spiritthe records of men's watch upon the world and on themselves.

Essential characteristic of the really great novelist: a Christ-like, all-embracing compassion.

It is with nations as it is with individuals. A book of history is a book of sermons.

Nevertheless, one learned very early that books had to be respected; they were all putative Bibles and to some small degree had a share in holiness.

Scholars are those who have read in books, but thinkers, men of genius, world-enlighteners, and reformers of the human race are those who have read directly in the book of the world.

A book is like a money-changer: it pays you back in another form what you brint to it.

I have always felt like an artist when I work on a book. I see no reason why the word should always be confined to writers of fiction and poetry.

I've yet to find the exact word to describe the enjoyment that an evening spent riffling through old pattern books can bring.

Through the use of books I had the whole world at my feet: could travel anywhere, meet anyone, and do anything.

I never had money for anything. But I tell you what did really work - books. Between the covers of those books I could go anyplace, I could be anybody, I could do anything.

You asked me where I generally lived. In my workshop [i.e. in his study] in the mornings and always in the library in the evening. Books are companions even if you don’t open them.

I write a book at least three times-once to understand it, the second time to improve the prose, and a third to compel it to say what it still must say.

[On being a judge for the 1986 Booker Prize:] I got to the point where I couldn't read a laundry list without considering it for the Booker Prize.

Experiencing life through a book can help you learn without all the pain of going through the experiences first hand.

I always wanted to do a baseball book; I love baseball. The problem is that a very large part of my following is in non-baseball playing countries.

Someday there is going to be a book about a middle-aged man with a good job, a beautiful wife and two lovely children who still manages to be happy.

One of these days I'm-a make me a book out of you.

I write books to relieve ­myself of pain. That's the prime motivator to write. Period.