From Book Quotes

Everyone wants to write a book. Very few people are able to do it.

When a good friend gives you his or her book, you don't want to read it, because you're afraid that it's not going be what you hope it can be.

All books should be trilogies; I mean I think we all agree on that.

Anyone of conscience could come look at my book and see it as an esoteric oddity or be intrigued by it. It could happen either way on a thousand different little decisions each individual might make.

My hope when I wrote the first book was that I would get to do it again. But it was not entirely clear that that would happen.

I have been illustrating Tolkien's books ever since I first read them, long before illustration became my profession.

I write very quickly; I rewrite very slowly. It takes me nearly as long to rewrite a book as it does to get the first draft.

My chest of books divide amongst my friends.

I think Americans like the practical; they like the human. And I like both those things myself, and I try and put them into my books.

Only men of considerable vanity write books; consistently therewith, I worried lest the world were exchanging an irreplaceable author for a more easily purchased diplomat.

I wouldn't write a book, because saying the word I over and over again would nauseate me.

You can sell a lot more books if you work with other authors than if you try to do everything all by yourself.

Do something every day to market each of your books for three years.

If thou need money, get it in an honest way by keeping books, if thou wilt, but not by writing books.

I grew up in a completely bookless household. It was my father's boast that he had never read a book from end to end.

I'm not an overnight success. My early publishing history, through my first five books, was unfortunate in many respects, typified by a couple of short anecdotes.

I love books, and all the best ones are people analysing their own emotions. You can learn from that.

Books are like my one and only joy.

Gentlemen use books as Gentlewomen handle their flowers, who in the morning stick them in their heads, and at night strawe them at their heeles.

This book is not a polemic treatise but a powerful, well-researched account that sensitizes any reader to the ways in which in-difference permits brutality and genocide.

If I were to write Web now, it would be a much, much darker book.

The Lord who gave us Earth and Heaven Takes that as thanks for all He's given. The book he lent is given back All blotted red and smutted black.

You know I used to be the back porch poet with my book of lines, always hoping knowing all the time, I'm probably never gonna find the perfect rhyme. . .For heavier things

I used to take five or six books away and bring five or six books back. Nobody gave me direction or advice and I read much in the way that a boy might watch television.

Deep vers'd in books, and shallow in himself.

Seasoned life of man preserved and stored up in books.

For books are as meats and viands are; some of good, some of evil sub-stance.

Heaven Is as the Book of God before thee set, Wherein to read His wondrous works.

If you cannot say what you have to say in twenty minutes, you should go away and write a book about it.

One day's exposure to mountains is better than cartloads of books. See how willingly Nature poses herself upon photographers' plates. No earthly chemicals are so sensitive as those of the human soul.

Books are but stepping stones to show you where other minds have been.

We who preach have one tool. We are people of the book.

You should read books like you take medicine, by advice, and not by advertisement.

How long most people would look at the best book before they would give the price of a large turbot for it?

An artist should be well read in the best books, and thoroughly high bred, both in heart and bearing. In a word, he should be fit for the best society, and should keef out of it.

I cannot think of a greater blessing than to die in one's own bed, without warning or discomfort, on the last page of a new book that we most wanted to read.

The more I want a book to be done, the faster I type because I just want to get it out.

I don't see myself as experimenting in any conscious way, it's perhaps that certain books require different densities of language.

My first day as an intern in the books department at Cosmopolitan also happened to be the day the O.J. Simpson verdict was announced.

I don't make that decision [what next book will be] until I've read enough to know that I've got something different to say and I know how to say it.

For the first time I am working on a book that is not limited and that will take every bit of experience and thought and feeling that I have.

To the red country and part of the gray country of Oklahoma, the last rains came gently, and they did not cut the scarred earth.

I love to read about anger. A "feel bad" book always makes me feel good. And no other novel in the history of literature is more depressing than Christina Stead's The Man Who Loved Children.

There's nothing I like more than a writer who can sing, or a musician who has a book out.

It's a complicated story [hoe I got into music ]. I actually wrote a book about it, titled For Sue.

I'm not that into reading. If I'm gonna read, I'm gonna read some cool sci-fi book or something, not some stupid self-help book.

I don't think I compete with myself by trying to make a better book. I don't know that that's possible. I mean, I've already done my best books, so I'd like to just make something I also like now.

...books possess an ounce-of-weight to minute-of-entertainment ratio that compares quite favorably to intoxicants.

When I start any book, I have no idea what I'm going to do.

Now that I've had a book published, it is quite validating, but a bit embarrassing.