Book Quotes

That's important to me, to recommend books.

The greatest compliment of the book [One Thousand Gifts]? Maybe the Muslim man in Iraq who was given the book and came to a saving knowledge of Jesus, wanted to live his life in thanks to God?

The book [ One Thousand Gifts] took just over a year to write, on the fringe hours, early and late, around home educating 6 kids and farming and blogging.

That was how the heroine of a book would play it and Diana was still writing her own story the best heroines she'd always believed took their fate into their own hands.

My obsessions tend to cluster, so I often have families of poems in which only a couple of them make it to the book. It can be satisfying to banish poems to my "crappy poems" file.

I like shows or films or books that have messages but don't beat people over the head with them.

When I write a novel, I have what I think of as an icon that helps get me into the world of the book.

I think books in which people are really happy and things are going well are probably the most challenging novels there are to write, and there are very few of them.

Every reader, I suspect, has a book like this somewhere in his or her past, a book that seemed to hold within it, at that moment, all the mysteries of the universe.

My home was in a pleasant place outside of Philadelphia. But I really lived, truly lived, somewhere else. I lived within the covers of books.

Ideas are like pizza dough, made to be tossed around, and nearly every book represents what my son's third grade teacher refers to as a "teachable moment.

I think I'm like most novelists in that my books have gotten farther and farther away from autobiography the longer I've been writing them.

I think one of the hardest things about doing a book in the first person is that to a certain extent each day, when you begin to do your work, you're climbing into somebody else's skin.

When I look at designer books I am sometimes puzzled why they don't share their inspiration, when it's obvious somebody had such great inspiration.

To me, the nicest luxury would be to have a room where I could keep all my books in one place - and have space for more.

One good thing about leaving daily journalism was that I was no longer obliged to read all the book prize short lists.

When you find yourself alone, or in a transition, you dream more. These are also the times when you read books.

I have a small room to write in. One wall is completely covered in books. And I face the window with the curtain closed to stop the light hitting the computer.

The only way to write a book, I’m fond of telling people, is to actually write a book. That’s how you write a book.

For 10 or 11 years, I had my kids, I wrote four or five books, and I was working all the damn time.

One of the convenient things about literature is that, despite copyrights [...] a book belongs to the reader as well as to the writer.

To use an electronics analogy, closing a book on a bookmark is like pressing the Stop button, whereas when you leave the book facedown, you've only pressed Pause.

Ordinary people don't know how much books can mean to someone who's cooped up.

My life's goal is not to write books; my life's goal is to know God better today. The neat thing about a goal like that is you can achieve it. Faith is constant; it's a relationship.

I devoured books like a person taking vitamins, afraid that otherwise I would remain this gelatinous narcissist, with no possibility of ever becoming thoughtful, of ever being taken seriously.

We were raised to believe in books, music, and nature.

For some of us, good books and beautiful writing are our ultimate solace, even more comforting than exquisite food.

Some people may have thought that this book was too personal, too confessional. But what these people think about me is none of my business.

I'm very successful, but there are 50,000 general interest books published every year. If you don't want to read mine, there are others.

At age 77, I need the help of someone with more energy than I can now summon to finish a book

I don't often reread my own books, unless I am going into another in the series and need to refresh my mood when originating the concept

Can you write a book and have children at the same time? Yes, if you're content to do it very very slowly.

There are so many books I mean to read, and things I mean to see.

The library furnished our dreams, helped us shape our ambitions, made up people of books and ideas and grand designs.

You reach deep down and bring up what feels absolutely authentic to you as you move along with the book, but you don't know everything about it. You can't.

Somebody said writing is easy, you just sit down at your typewriter and open a vein. It depends on the book. Some, I have to do quite a lot of research, which I like. Others are much closer to me.

If I were planning to be stranded on a desert island, I wouldn't take Freud's books with me, because I've already read them all.

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.

I hated childhood, and spent it sitting behind a book waiting for adulthood to arrive.

I forget a book as soon as I finish writing it, which is not always a good thing

I think I was born with the impression that what happened in books was much more reasonable, and interesting, and real, in some ways, than what happened in life.

I think Visions of Cody is the most radical book in terms of poetic stretch and the way Jack Kerouac is able to incorporate documentation and incorporate the live tape recording of Neal and so on.

If you're going to publish a book, you probably are going to make a fool of yourself.

Books swept me away, this way and that, one after the other; I made endless vows according to their lights for I believed them.

All my books started out as extravagant and ended up pure and plain.

People who read are not too lazy to turn on the television; they prefer books.

Almost all of my many passionate interests, and my many changes of mind, came through books. Books prompted the many vows I made to myself.

I'm a pretty decent writer. It comes easy to me. I don't agonize over sentences. I write like I talk. I try to make them good books.

I am a delightfully evangelical guy about things I love. I am that annoying guy who sits everyone down and forces them to read some book I like. I'm looking across the full spectrum of genres.

As a boy, I devoured comics but never saw what we now describe as a picture book.