Book Quotes
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You never want to be the worst bowler of the group-because then everyone treats you like you have cancer. "You can do it! We're praying for you." The advice starts. "Use a heavier ball." "Keep your arm straight." "You should get a vasectomy." If you're really bad at bowling like me, they'll ask if want the bumpers up. Not that bowling is that complex anyway. "You want the bumpers? We can get rid of the pins. Why don't you take this coloring book and sit in the corner?"
Jim Gaffigan
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Writing is a process and you must trust the process! Fear and anxiety are part of that process along with the enthusaism and the good days and the joy and the passion and the great hopes you have for a book. But when you run into problems, when you get stuck or scared, you must trust that that is part of how a book comes to pass, and what you need to do is get very still and quiet because Self will tell you how to get out of a hole you've dug for yourself.
Sue Grafton
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The Long, Long Trailer (1954) actually happened and the man wrote a book about it. Father of the Bride, same thing; a banker wrote that who had never written anything else.
Vincente Minnelli
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I work even when I am on vacation. You know that line by Stéphane Mallarmé, "All earthly existence must ultimately be contained in a book"? I am the kind of person who finds life interesting only if it is translated into writing, if it is parsed into words.
Bernard-Henri Levy
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Books wind into the heart.
William Hazlitt
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My first book was published without any editorial advice. Nobody said, 'You might do this or that,' or 'Why don't we see more of this.' I merely took the book and published it.
James Salter
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O my Bergson, you are a magician, and your book is a marvel, a real wonder in the history of philosophy . . . In finishing it I found . . . such a flavor of persistent euphony, as of a rich river that never foamed or ran thin, but steadily and firmly proceeded with its banks full to the brim.
William James
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I feel like one can have all of that as a writer; you're writing, you're reading, you're talking to interesting and intelligent people. Your life is structured around whatever book you're writing, and so is your reading and so are many of your conversations.
Sheila Heti
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I do not remember a time since I have been capable of loving books that I have not loved Shakespeare.
Helen Keller
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My agent is so totally honest, which is just what every writer needs. She won't let me sell a crappy book, even if I want to.
Sarah Dessen
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I certainly grew up seeing more movies and television than I read books, but when it came time to do the thing itself you don't have to hire a lot of people to sit down and write a book, so that was the story-telling medium that was available to me.
John Sayles
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I started a funny book from the 1930s called The Code of the Woosters by P. G. Wodehouse. Wodehouse is a comic genius.
William Gurstelle
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There was an agent who wanted to book me for Glee. He lied and said I could sing. He was like, "If you need a guy in a wheelchair who has a great voice, I've got your guy!" I was like, "What are you talking about?" .
Zach Anner
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Hogben's Science for the Citizen would be an admirable text-book for such teaching.
John Desmond Bernal
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If I may bend your ear for a moment, I like Terry Pratchett. I like footnotes. I like footnotes even when they are not as entertaining as a Pratchett footnote, even when they are in the middle of a book on evolutionary biology and briefly explain the Red Queen hypothesis or the fate of the Stephen's Island Wren or how many bunnies can dance on the back of Australia. Footnotes fill me with a very mild glee. The endnote simply does not compare.
Ursula Vernon
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I'm not a writer's writer. I'm not a craftsman. I could be, and that would be a one-book-a-year operation.
James Patterson
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In three months Ron read more than he had in his entire previous life. He felt his mind widen, his perceptions become more acute, for each book was a prism refracting the infinitely varied truths of experience. Some were telescopes; some microscopes.
Edward Bunker
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You can't ever approach a book as a complete virgin, certainly not if you're a critic. There is a lot of bad faith out there. That's why I finally trained myself not to look at this stuff anymore, because it doesn't do me any good to see myself either praised or attacked.
Paul Auster
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Once, she'd been a pro at decompressing, loved to sit on the back deck of the beach house in one of our splintery Adirondack chairs for hours at a time, staring at the ocean. She never had a book or the paper or anything else to distract her. Just the horizon, but it kept her attention, her gaze unwavering. Maybe it was the absence of thought that she loved about being out there, the world narrowing to just the pounding of the waves as the water moved in and out.
Sarah Dessen
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A book makes claims of literary art.
David Shields
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The best book is but the record of the best life.
John Lancaster Spalding
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I'm remembering one book that I wrote, 'Fourth Grade Rats,' that took a month to write, but most of them, full-length novels, I would say about a year.
Jerry Spinelli
