Book Quotes
-
Books that kids read should be about what is going on in the world.
-
You work hard on a book and throw it out there and then it's beyond your control.
-
I've always had great respect for Paddington because he is amusingly English and eccentric. He is a great British institution and my generation grew up with the books and then Michael Horden's animations.
-
I've always believed that everything that is said from authority is either the authority of one's own heart, one's own brain, one's own reading, one's own trust, but not the authority of someone who claims it because they're speaking for God and they know the truth because it's written in a book. That, essentially, is where I come from. In a sense, tolerance is my religion. Reason is my religion.
-
That's all you have to ask from yourself writing a book. That it's the best you can do and that you did it without any ego involved and that you did it for somebody else. That's the best you can do.
-
I always resented books that tried to teach a lesson, where the characters are too good: They don't swear, they tell their mothers everything.
-
The book trade invented literary prizes to stimulate sales, not to reward merit.
-
Properly, we should read for power. Man reading should be man intensely alive. The book should be a ball of light in one's hand.
-
Too many people write books as a calling card.
-
School was a source of great suffering to me, but once I learned to read, I disappeared into books, where I was a happy visitor to all the worlds that sprang full-blown from the printed page.
-
The First Lady asked me how many people passed through the White House on tours. When I told her thousands did, she said they should sell something to the tourists and use the profits to help redecorate the White House. She decided to make a small book. It cost 42 cents and sold for a dollar. Over the years it has brought in $42 million.
-
A book, like a landscape, is a state of consciousness varying with readers.
-
I think books with weak or translucent plots can survive if the character being drawn along the path is rich, interesting and multi-faceted. The opposite is not true.
-
My father taught me to love detective fiction writers such as Raymond Chandler. When I decided to have a hard-boiled detective series I did a lot of studying before I wrote the first book. I learned police procedure, the California criminal law, and many areas outside my expertise.
-
I always want my books to reach a positive point in the end.
-
I spent three days a week for 10 years educating myself in the public library, and it's better than college. People should educate themselves - you can get a complete education for no money. At the end of 10 years, I had read every book in the library and I'd written a thousand stories.
-
The only reason to buy a paper book any longer is to own it and cherish it and remember it and tell a story about it.
-
What a big book, captain, might be made with all that is known!" "And what a much bigger book still with all that is not known!
-
The fact is that I am always thinking of something to build. A new book, radio show, plans for a trip somewhere. I am not a very happy person but I feel pretty even when I am working, so I guess that is how I am wired.
-
I dream of writing a book like LOVERS some day. It is so spare but so rich. It is history made intimate, and a masterpiece of compression.
-
I never imagined while going through this horrifying illness that I would write a book or that it could ever be a movie.
-
I ransack public libraries & find them full of sunk treasure.
-
Read a lot - poems, prose, stories, newspapers, anything. Read books and poems that you think you will like and some that you think might not be for you. You might be surprised.
-
I spent my entire time reading books and going to the cinema, just to escape.
