Book Quotes

I write funny nonfiction adventure books about crazy, serious worlds.

There are six Time Warp Trio books that would take a page each to fully praise. And I just thought up twelve more while I was typing this sentence.

I'd wanted to be a writer since I was knee-high. Once I knew that books were written by people and didn't just happen, it was obviously that I would write them, too.

The Book of Mormon is so good it makes me f**king angry.

Novelists may be able to seek advice from readers and editors, but in the end, it is up to them to get the book right.

There is, in my mind, no higher compliment to pay a non-fiction book than to say it reads like a novel.

The premise of my book is that everyone is a bit ideological to some extent. Everyone comes from a ideological perspective.

For me, books have always been a way to feel less alone while being alone.

Don't hold me to anything in the book. I'm a waffler. I like wafflers. They said John Kerry was a waffler, but I admired him for that - showed he could change his mind.

I've always been inspired by Don Quixote as a role model of sorts, of the power of books to sort of make you insane in maybe a beautiful way.

I don't laugh that much, but I do like humorous books, and I like to entertain readers that way.

For me, books have always been a way to feel less alone while being alone. Perhaps if I was depressed and isolated, just communicating with these authors through their sentences helped me.

But at the same time, I have trouble keeping things out of books, which is why I don't write short stories because they turn into novels.

But you can try to read books at the wrong time or for the wrong reasons.

You should not really entertaining anyone else, but trying to be yourself, because there are already more good books than you or I could ever read in our lifetime.

That's a long way of saying no, I'm always too bound up in thinking about the characters in whatever I'm working on and trying to make good to dwell on characters from previous books.

Luckily for you, you can close the book The Postman Always Rings Twice and break out of it, and James M. Cain can't. I can't think of any redeeming feature he has, but he's extremely compelling.

I don't personally like the e-readers they've come up with so far. I don't fetishize books, but I do like that they're solid and unchanging.

I was about 13, in some ways, when I wrote the first book. Approximately 18 when I wrote the second.

I'm not too concerned what happens to my books after I'm dead. But I am very concerned by what's going on with the culture of reading and writing nowadays.

Books aren’t just my defenses, the sandbags I use to fortify my position; they are also the building blocks of my soul, and I am the sum of all I read.

Without art; without paintings, books, sculpture and music, the human soul would be quite impenetrable, don't you think?

I wrote the first book, and I thought people would say: 'Separate and unequal schools in the City of Boston? I didn't know that. Let's go out and fix it.'

With a book you can read the same paragraph four times. You can go back to page 21 when you're on page 300. You can't do that with film. It just charges ahead.

I hate libraries for the way they put stickers on things. I don't approve of folding over pages, or of writing in books. God, forget scissors - that's beyond the pale.

The computer is the way I'm making books, but I still think about the physical properties. I visualize the length of a book, the proportions of a book, in material terms.

Every book is a kind of experiment in doing something that feels impossible.

Making books has always felt very connected to my bookselling experience, that of wanting to draw people's attention to things that I liked, to shape things that I liked into new shapes.

I want to write books that can be read a hundred years from now, and readers wouldn't be bogged down by irrelevant details.

One of the things that novels have tended not to concentrate on over the centuries is the fact that people read books.

I prefer old books and find them more relevant. I dislike new books. It's like drinking wine that's not ready.

How do you know that?" "Because,"Chong said with raised eyebrows,"when you open those things called 'books',there are words as well as pictures.Sometimes the words tell you stuff.

When I first started writing in my early 20s it was literary criticism for a very eccentric magazine called Books And Bookmen, which allowed me to write, more or less anything.

Reading the [The Verso Book of Dissent] is like encountering the best version of our angry selves.

Books are a time machine.

I'll read a book every now and then, but unlike most of my friends I don't always have one on the go.

The only book by a modern president that bears serious comparison with Obama's 'Dreams From My Father' is Jimmy Carter's short campaign autobiography, 'Why Not the Best?,' published in 1975.

Books admitted me to their world open-handedly, as people for their most part, did not. The life I lived in books was one of ease and freedom, worldly wisdom, glitter, dash and style.

Also, I designed a pretty fascinating bracelet, where you put a rubber band around your favorite book of poems for a year, and then you take it off and wear it.

Art can be very political but that can't be the purpose of art, it can't be the driving force. It isn't with any of the books that I love, anyway.

I love the idea of books being more than books, or being, rather, something other than books.

Reality Hunger is more than thought-provoking; it's one of the most beautiful books I've read in a long time.

I started carrying blank books like this one around, which I would fill with all the things I couldn't say.

Books are for those without real lives, he thought. And they are no real replacement.

He was someone whom everyone admired and liked but whom nobody knew. He was like a book that you could feel good holding, that you could talk about without ever having read, that you could recommend.

I'm not funny. People assume that because my books are funny, I'll be funny in real life. It's the inevitable disappointment of meeting me.

I write because I want to end my loneliness. Books make people less alone. That, before and after everything else, is what books do. They show us that conversations are possible across distances.

Books are slow, books are quiet. The Internet is fast and loud.

Literature was the only religion her father practiced, when a book fell on the floor he kissed it, when he was done with a book he tried to give it away to someone who would love it.

The books could be completely worthless, and things we don't even read now could be considered the most important books.