Book Quotes
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People who take books on sex to bed become frigid. You get self-conscious. You can't think a story. You can't think, "I shall do a story to improve mankind." Well, it's nonsense. All the great stories, all the really worthwhile plays, are emotional experiences. If you have to ask yourself whether or not you love a girl or you love a boy, forget it. You don't. A story is the same way. You either feel a story and need to write it, or you better not write it.
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Knowing you have something good to read before bed is among the most pleasurable of sensations.
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Do you know that books smell like nutmeg or some spice from a foreign land? I loved to smell them when I was a boy. Lord, there were a lot of lovely books once, before we let them go.
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A book burrows into your life in a very profound way because the experience of reading is not passive.
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Which is the woman, which the child? The joyous laugh that opens doors, steals sugared moments from the shelf? Or the dreamer mixing metaphors with tears to make a book of self To read aloud in winter's rooms When summer's sounds have ceased to bloom?
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Judicious mothers will always keep in mind that they are the first book read, and the last put aside, in every childs library.
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Take a book, the poorest one written, but read it with the passion that it is the only book you will read. Ultimately, you will read everything out of it, that is, as much as there was in yourself, and you could never get more out of reading, even if you read the best of books.
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On the other hand, I still approach each book with the same basic plan in mind - to put some people under severe stress and see how they hold up.
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Librarians save lives by handing the right book at the right time to a kid in need.
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The problem in our country isn't with books being banned, but with people no longer reading. Look at the magazines, the newspapers around us - it's all junk, all trash, tidbits of news. The average TV ad has 120 images a minute. Everything just falls off your mind. You don't have to burn books to destroy a culture. Just get people to stop reading them.
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I never read a horse book in my life. But I thought that's what my friends were reading and that's what I should be reading. And this was "Dobbin Does This" and "Dobbin Does That."
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Write a book you'd like to read. If you wouldn't read it, why would anybody else? Don't write for a perceived audience or market. It may well have vanished by the time your book's ready.
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That's my anxiety dream. I go to the library and all the books on my subject are out.
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Even after Sword was published, I was still only thinking about the next book, Elfstones.
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'The Great Gatsby' is a book I have read a few times, and it seems to get heavier every time I come to visit.
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One of my favorite authors is Robert Cormier. He was a devout Catholic and a very nice man, which might not be the impression you get from reading his books.
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Books opened up a whole new world to me. Through them I discovered new ideas, traveled to new places, and met new people. Books helped me learn to understand other people and they taught me a lot about myself. ... Some books you never forget. Some characters become your friends for life.
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Preface to second edition. I am satisfied that if a book is a good one, it is so whatever the sex of the author may be.
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A few months ago, I would have thrown this book down in disgust and walked away—maybe even returned home, where the only books I knew reminded me of my father. But now… My fingers wrapped around the spine of the book. Now I was willing to try anything.
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I had not seen "Pride and Prejudice," till I read that sentence of yours, and then I got the book. And what did I find? An accurate daguerreotyped portrait of a common-place face; a carefully fenced, highly cultivated garden, with neat borders and delicate flowers; but no glance of a bright, vivid physiognomy, no open country, no fresh air, no blue hill, no bonny beck. I should hardly like to live with her ladies and gentlemen, in their elegant but confined houses.
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Many of my sharpest critics have decided to take a position of ignoring me - because they feel that by attacking me, they would draw attention to my book and give me more publicity and help me sell more books. So I think that they decided that the best thing for them to do is to say nothing. Also, I think that some of my critics simply can't refute my argument - and so it's easier for them to ignore it as well, so that they're not forced to confront the logical contradiction in their own position.
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But the vast majority of books ever written are not accessible to anyone except the most tenacious researchers at premier academic libraries. Books written after 1923 quickly disappear into a literary black hole.
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If someone's going to publish a book about addiction, it has to say something new and different. It has to be something we haven't read before. A lot of these books are published because the writing is wonderful. The Frey book has superb writing, and that can be enough to sell a book.
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Often it's the latest novel that I've written that is my favourite. I'd been dreaming it for so long, living and breathing its story so that when it finally arrives as a newly published book, smelling wonderful and fresh out of the box, there is nothing like it.
