Book Quotes
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All my big heroes are literary, writers. I'd love to meet Jimmy Hendrix or John Coltrane, but I'd much rather meet Thomas Wolfe, or F. Scott Fitzgerald. Words and books have always meant a lot to me. That someone can take words and string them together to where they will move me is just a hell of a thing. It's amazing to me; more amazing to me than music or painting. It's always been the written word or the spoken word, like a great lecture or a great lyric, or a great poem. To me it's just amazing. And I always aspire toward capturing that, or my version of it.
Henry Rollins
Black Flag
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Forrest Mims is the author of the famous book 'Getting Started in Electronics,' published by RadioShack for many years. I bought the book in the 1980s and had a blast making the projects in it. When I was editor-in-chief of 'MAKE,' I asked Forrest to write a column for the magazine, called 'The Backyard Scientist.'
Mark Frauenfelder
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I do better just letting the stories develop. I don't outline very well, and I can't follow it if I do. Once I've outlined it, why write the damn book?
Joe R. Lansdale
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I love rare books. Not that I own a lot of them, mind you. You couldn't quite call me a rare-book collector. But I did once work in a rare-books library, and I wrote a novel about a rare book.
Lev Grossman
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I've always figured the only way I could finish a book and get a plot was just to keep making it longer and longer until something happens - you know, until it finds its own plot - because you can't outline and then fit the thing into it. I suppose it's a slow way of working.
Nelson Algren
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I was very interested in vaudeville. It was the only sort of discipline that was a five-minute act on stage, which is what I really enjoyed and saw myself doing. And I bought books on it.
Steve Martin
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Grandmaster games are said to begin with novelty, which is the first move of the game that exits the book. It could be the fifth, it could be the thirty-fifth. We think about a chess game as beginning with move one and ending with checkmate. But this is not the case. The games begins when it gets out of book, and it end when it goes into book..And this is why Game 6 [between Garry Kasparov and Deep Blue] didn't count...Tripping and falling into a well on your way to the field of battle is not the same thing as dying in it...Deep Blue is only itself out of book; prior to that it is nothing. Just the ghosts of the game itself.
Brian Christian
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Writers who want to interfere with adaptations of their work are basically undemocratic. The book still stands as an entity on its own.
Jim Crace
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How long most people would look at the best book before they would give the price of a large turbot for it?
John Ruskin
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In seminary he had been taught that God had completely stopped any overt communication with moderns, preferring to have them only listen to and follow sacred Scripture, properly interpreted, of course. God's voice had been reduced to paper, and even that paper had to be moderated and deciphered by the proper authorities and intellects. It seemed that direct communication with God was something exclusively for the ancients and uncivilized, while educated Westerner's access to God was mediated and controlled by the intelligentsia. Nobody wanted God in a box, just in a book.
William P. Young
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I was approached by this guy Chris Renshaw, who had read my book and had read Leigh's book. He wanted to incorporate both characters - he probably felt Leigh wasn't famous enough and he realized Leigh Bowery and I were associated.
Boy George
Culture Club
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I found myself jealous of the people who wrote the books. They were dead and they were still taking up my time. Who did they think they were?
Ned Vizzini
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I think if Roman Polanski had asked me to do the phone book, I would have said, 'Yes.'
Pierce Brosnan
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Curiously enough, one cannot read a book; one can only reread it. A good reader, a major reader, and active and creative reader is a rereader.
Vladimir Nabokov
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The book [ A Passage to India ] shows signs of fatigue and disillusionment; but it has chapters of clear and triumphant beauty, and above all it makes us wonder, what will he write next?
E. M. Forster
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It is with the reading of books the same as with looking at pictures; one must, without doubt, without hesitations, with assurance, admire what is beautiful.
Vincent Van Gogh
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If someone can relate my guitar solo to an exercise in a book... that's no fun at all.
Joe Satriani
Chickenfoot
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You see, the interesting thing about books, as opposed, say, to films, is that it's always just one person encountering the book, it's not an audience, it's one to one.
Paul Auster
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I found Uriah reading a great fat book, with such demonstrative attention, that his lank forefinger followed up every line as he read, and made clammy tracks along the page (or so I fully believed) like a snail.
Charles Dickens
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Book clubs are the best thing that has happened to the world of publishing.
Adriana Trigiani
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You can't. Do you hear me? You think you've figured something out? You run over here so pleased with yourself because you changed your mind. Now you're certain. You're so... sloppy. You don't know anything. The book, the math, the dates, the writing, all that stuff you decided with your buddies, it's just evidence. It doesn't finish the job. It doesn't prove anything.
David Auburn
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At religious instruction classes, I encountered The Pilgrims Progress by John Bunyan, and the sincerity of the traveller in that book was overwhelming.
Lionel Blue
