From Book Quotes

In general I ask for books that make use of learning, not those that build it up.

And therefore, Reader, I myself am the subject of my book: it is not reasonable that you should employ your leisure on a topic so frivolous and so vain. Therefore, Farewell.

Books are a languid pleasure.

If to take up books were to take them in, and if to see them were to consider them, and to run through them were to grasp them, I should be wrong to make myself out quite as ignorant as I say I am.

And one might therefore say of me that in this book I have only made up a bunch of other people's flowers, and that of my own I have only provided the string that ties them together.

All the world knows me in my book, and my book in me.

I want to be seen here in my simple, natural, ordinary fashion, without straining or artifice; for it is myself that I portray... I am myself the matter of my book.

Every book I've written has been different from the others, and each one seems to have its own timeline, requirements, and formal challenges.

No one likes my books except the public.

The first page sells this book. The last page sells your next book.

Oh yeah, I was one of the first guys writing comic books, I wrote Captain America, with guys like Stan Lee, who became famous later on with Marvel Comics.

If you hold a beautiful flower in your hand, you can write a whole book about it. However, you are still just you perceiving and experiencing it from your own point of view.

All my book are my favorites.

Nay, what is worse, perhaps turn poet, which, they say, is an infectious and incurable distemper.

The world is a book. Some words stand out from the page.

When a book is read an irrevocable thing happens — a murder, followed by an imposture. The story in the mind murders the story on the page, and takes its place.

My reputation when I was first here was that I had every single answer in the book. I don't know, maybe I portrayed that somehow. I was learning, and I continue to learn and I have learned.

Every time there's a revolution, it comes from somebody reading a book about revolution. David Walker wrote a book and Nat Turner did his thing.

I found that inevitably you cannot fit everything that is in that book into what is inevitably going to go on screen.

I have had moments where I've had mental-health issues and I've felt like yoga and meditating and reading these Buddhist self-help books actually really help.

I came to America when I was seven and a half in 91. I think the first full length book in English that I read was Return to Oz when I was nine years old.

It's fun to play somebody who has no boundaries or rules. There's no book you can read on how to play a witch, so you just create a version. It's really great!

In Tereza's eyes, books were the emblems of a secret brotherhood

There are moments when I resent even buying a book. But browsing is wonderful. I like to go and browse everywhere, even fashion shops. You can get influences from anywhere.

Having a book is actually like a great master - helping to build a universe and unify work - especially in my pictures where there is such a strong signature, yet with a set of rigorous rules to it.

The reason I never want a book to end is that I start to feel like the characters are my friends. I'll miss them when they're gone.

I used to sit when I was a kid, from 14 or 15 on, with a book or a paper or a magazine in front of a mirror and teach myself to speak with a more straight mouth, so it wasn't so pronounced.

I am convinced that the minimum-wage law is the most anti-Negro law on our statute books in its effect, not its intent.

There are many teenage vampire books you could have purchased instead. I'm grateful you made this choice.

This book will take you two days to read. Did you even see the cover? It’s mostly pink. If you’re reading this book every night for months, something is not right.

An erratum is a correction inserted into a book after publication. It's a nice thing to collect because you can't go after them, you just come upon them. In 25 years I've only found about 12.

I like embracing kind of normal forms but am always trying to approach them as if no one's ever done that before. As if I'm literally the first person to ever write a book.

There weren't too many books featuring other cultures and countries when I was growing up as an immigrant kid here in the States.

Got an hour or two? That's all it takes for one of my books.

Nobody's favorite movie is some dark, dysfunctional slasher story. Everybody's favorite song is a sentimental song. So why all of a sudden is it bad to be sentimental in books?

For as spiritual as some people think my books are, I've never really dealt with religious things.

I don't have any children, but if I had a baby, I would have to name it, so I would get a baby-naming book. Or I would invite somebody over who had a cast on.

Sending a book out into the world is a lot like sending your child to the first day of kindergarten. You hope the other kids play nice and that she makes friends.

[on L. Ron Hubbard] I'm not in favor of his religion by any means. But he wrote a book called 'Battlefield Earth' that was a very fun science-fiction book.

I'm always working on a few different stories at once, so there's always some really big coffee table book I'm carrying around.

When I was growing up, I was the most pretentious person I have ever met. I only read obscure books and watched obscure movies and only listened to obscure music.

The notion of love as a potentially destructive and potentially redemptive human force is something that comes across in all my books.

It's in being read that a book becomes a book, and in each of a million different readings a book become one of a million different books . . .

I take six or seven years to write really small books. There is a kind of aesthetic of leanness, of brevity.

Why the brevity? Because I'd rather people read my book twice than only half-way through

Oftentimes I deliberately put ambiguity into my books so that... the reader is left with an echo of: 'How much of this was from me?'

I'd rather create a miniature painting than a Taj Mahal of a book.

The anger is useful too because when things about the world upset you, that is really a fertile feeling to channel into fiction and to put out into books.

If you want to hurt me, fine. Take my books. Burn down my house. Shave my head while I am sleeping. But nobody, nobody screws with my dog.

When I was turning 40, I felt that there were no books out there that hit the spot in terms of what I wanted to read.