Book famous quotes
Last updated: Sep 5, 2024
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The success that comes from my books is not something I feel very comfortable with. Past a certain point you have to accept the idea that the success is a lot to do with the timing and luck and that divorces you from it massively. There are aspects of it that I haven't got used to at all. But I've enjoyed some parts of it massively. It relates to the same reason I did a lot of backpacking — partly for the experience — it's something to tell my grandkids. It's a weird chain of events to have in your life.
-- Alex Garland -
I suppose that it was inevitable that my word-base broadened. I could now for the first time pick up a book and read and now begin to understand what the book was saying. Anyone who has read a great deal can imagine the new world that opened. Let me tell you something: from then until I left that prison, in every free moment I had, if I was not reading in the library, I was reading in my bunk. You couldn’t have gotten me out of my books with a wedge...Months passed without my even thinking about being imprisoned. In fact, up to then, I never had been so truly free in my life.
-- Alex Haley -
I certainly wasn't seeking any degree, the way a college confers a status symbol upon its students. My homemade education gave me, with every additional book that I read, a little bit more sensitivity to the deafness, dumbness and blindness that was afflicting the black race in America. Not long ago, an English writer telephoned me, asking questions. One was, "What's your alma mater?" I told him, "Books.
-- Alex Haley -
I look at my books the way parents look at their children. The fact that one becomes more successful than the others doesn't make me love the less successful one any less.
-- Alex Haley -
Our cities need to change, fast. Tactical Urbanism is a guided tour of solutions created when local people decide they can't wait for politics to catch up before they improve their neighborhoods. This weathervane book deserves a place on any urbanist's bookshelf.
-- Alex Steffen -
Every now and then, you find a book that feels like it was keyed to your DNA.
-- Alexander Chee -
Throughout my reading life, I've enjoyed many memorable meals-if only fictionally. The oysters at dinner near the beginning of Anna Karenina, the dinner Nana throws for her overflowing guests in Zola's Nana, the walk through Les Halles for breakfast in Baldwin's Giovanni's Room, and nearly every meal in Monique Truong's The Book of Salt.
-- Alexander Chee -
We don't perceive a contradiction between writing books, making films or producing a television program. These days you can't choose how you want to express yourself anymore.
-- Alexander Kluge -
If you want to write, do two things - read lots of books and also, in your own writing, practise. Just write and write and then write again. persist. And never be put off or discouraged. You can do it!
-- Alexander McCall Smith -
I write four or five a books a year. That means that I usually have one on the go. I am fortunate in being able to write quickly - 1000 words an hour.
-- Alexander McCall Smith -
I write four books a year. I'm very fortunate that I write quickly; around 3,500 words a day. Being strict about delineating my writing time and personal life, as well as keeping distractions at bay, is the only way I can accomplish this.
-- Alexander McCall Smith -
Many of my books are written from a female perspective. I rather enjoy the take that women have on the world, and certainly I enjoy the conversations that women have.
-- Alexander McCall Smith -
I always wanted to be a designer. I read books on fashion from the age of 12.
-- Alexander McQueen -
I was literally 3 years old when I started drawing. I did it all my life, through primary school, secondary school, all my life. I always, always wanted to be a designer. I read books on fashion from the age of twelve. I followed designer's careers. I knew Giorgio Armani was a window-dresser, Emanuel Ungaro was a tailor.
-- Alexander McQueen -
This is a major, wide-ranging, and comprehensive book. A philosophical investigation that is also a literary and historical study, Truth and Truthfulness asks how and why we have come to think of accuracy, sincerity, and authenticity as virtues. Bernard Williams' account of their emergence is as detailed and imaginative as his defense of their importance is spirited and provocative. Williams asks hard questions, and gives them straightforward and controversial answers. His book does not simply describe and advocate these virtues of truthfulness; it manifests them.
-- Alexander Nehamas -
I could never be a part of an adaptation of a film where there's pressure to not disappoint the immense fan base. In those cases, they often wind up with filmed books on tape, quite uncinematic. Having said that, I'd say all the adaptations I've done are quite faithful to the original. You have to pick and choose which storylines and plot threads, because you don't have the time to kill in the film as they have in novels. All those pages with detours and plots and different storylines. But films add a lot, and you gotta keep it moving.
-- Alexander Payne -
A book suggests a whole world and story that I could have never thought of in a million years.
-- Alexander Payne -
Even if we die at 100, we're still dying young. I want at least 700 years. There's a lot of travelling and books to read and movies to see. I'm not going to squeeze it all in in 85 years.
-- Alexander Payne -
Heav'n from all creatures hides the book of fate, All but the page prescribed, their present state: From brutes what men, from men what spirits know: Or who could suffer being here below?
-- Alexander Pope -
To buy books as some do who make no use of them, only because they were published by an eminent printer, is much as if a man should buy clothes that did not fit him, only because they were made by some famous tailor.
-- Alexander Pope -
The pure and noble, the graceful and dignified, simplicity of language is nowhere in such perfection as in the Scriptures and Homer. The whole book of Job, with regard both to sublimity of thought and morality, exceeds, beyond all comparison, the most noble parts of Homer.
-- Alexander Pope -
Heaven from all creatures hides the book of Fate.
-- Alexander Pope -
Manners with fortunes, humors turn with climes, tenets with books, and principles with times.
-- Alexander Pope -
There yet remains but one concluding tale, And then this chronicle of mine is ended Fulfilled, the duty God ordained to me, A sinner. Not without purpose did the Lord Put me to witness much for many years And educate me in the love of books. One day some indefatigable monk Will find my conscientious, unsigned work; Like me, he will light up his ikon-lamp And, shaking from the scroll the age-old dust, He will transcribe these tales in all their truth.
-- Alexander Pushkin -
In my garden I spend my days; in my library I spend my nights.
-- Alexander Smith -
In my garden I spend my days, in my library I spend my nights. My interests are divided between my geraniums and my books. With the flower I am in the present; with the book I am in the past.
-- Alexander Smith -
Books are a finer world within the world. (1863)
-- Alexander Smith -
Seated in my library at night, and looking on the silent faces of my books, I am occasionally visited by a strange sense of the supernatural.
-- Alexander Smith -
Some books are drenchèd sandsOn which a great soul's wealth lies all in heaps,Like a wrecked argosy.
-- Alexander Smith -
Will I have to use a dictionary to read your book?" asked Mrs. Dodypol. "It depends," says I, "how much you used the dictionary before you read it.
-- Alexander Theroux -
Sit, Phantom!" Ivy cooed. "On your bottom!" "Oh, for goodness' sake!" Gabriel put down his book and pointed a longer finger at Phantom. "Sit," he commanded in a deep voice. Phantom looked sheepish and sank straight to the floor. Ivy scowled in frustration. "I've been trying to get him to do that all day! What is it with dogs and male authority?
-- Alexandra Adornetto -
Who knows the flower best? - the one who reads about it in a book, or the one who finds it wild on the mountainside?
-- Alexandra David-Neel -
Until I read Anne Frank's diary, I had found books a literal escape from what could be the harsh reality around me. After I read the diary, I had a fresh way of viewing the both literature and the world. From then on, I found I was impatient with books that were not honest or that were trivial and frivolous.
-- Alexandra Fuller -
There's a point at which writing a book, or a long article, begins to feel like mental labor, and it's too painful to connect in the world in any real way mid-process. The only way to survive is to write until it is all said and done.
-- Alexandra Fuller -
I am becoming increasingly difficult to please as a reader, but I adore being surprised by a really wonderful book, written by someone I've never heard of before.
-- Alexandra Fuller -
FBI Girl is a gorgeous, sumptuous book. Conlon-McIvor takes a subject (herself and her family) that might have sunk in other hands, beats egg white under her words and the whole thing rises like a dream. It's a love story for her people and for a time and place. Read it.
-- Alexandra Fuller -
Books have become products, like cereal or perfume or deodorant.
-- Alexandra Ripley -
I've been reading this little book. It's called the Russian constitution. And it says that the only source of power in Russia is the people. So I don't want to hear those who say we're appealing to the authorities. Who's the power here?
-- Alexei Navalny -
I have no regrets because I did everything by the book.
-- Alexis Arguello -
The value of a book about dealing with children is inversely proportional to the number of times it contains the word behavior.
-- Alfie Kohn -
To me film school was film history because there weren't a lot of books out there that I had access to.
-- Alfonso Gomez-Rejon -
Had I been present at the Creation, I would have given some useful hints for the better ordering of the universe. Remarking on the complexity of Ptolemaic model of the universe after it was explained to him. Footnote: Carlyle says, in his History of Frederick the Great, book ii. chap. vii. that this saying of Alphonso about Ptolemy's astronomy, 'that it seemed a crank machine; that it was pity the Creator had not taken advice,' is still remembered by mankind, - this and no other of his many sayings.
-- Alfonso X of Castile -
In the company of friends, writers can discuss their books, economists the state of the economy, lawyers their latest cases, and businessmen their latest acquisitions, but mathematicians cannot discuss their mathematics at all. And the more profound their work, the less understandable it is.
-- Alfred Adler -
We should get into the habit of reading inspirational books, looking at inspirational pictures, hearing inspirational music, associating with inspirational friends.
-- Alfred Armand Montapert -
A classic is a book that survives the circumstances that made it possible yet alone keeps those circumstances alive.
-- Alfred Kazin -
A recluse without books and ink is already in life a dead man.
-- Alfred Nobel -
Learning is often spoken of as if we are watching the open pages of all the books which we have ever read, and then, when occasion arises, we select the right page to read aloud to the universe.
-- Alfred North Whitehead -
Whenever a text-book is written of real educational worth, you may be quite certain that some reviewer will say that it will be difficult to teach from it. Of course it will be difficult to teach from it. It it were easy, the book ought to be burned.
-- Alfred North Whitehead -
This outer world is but the pictured scroll Of worlds within the soul; A colored chart, a blazoned missal-book, Whereon who rightly look May spell the splendors with their mortal eyes, And steer to Paradise.
-- Alfred Noyes -
We had many books and pictures... my parents' way of life doubtless left a lasting impression on me. They created an atmosphere in which a certain kind of freedom could exist. This may well account for my seeking a related sense of liberty as I grew up.
-- Alfred Stieglitz -
Books won't stay banned. They won't burn. Ideas won't go to jail. In the long run of history, the censor and the inquisitor have always lost. The only sure weapon against bad ideas is better ideas. The source of better ideas is wisdom. The surest path to wisdom is a liberal education.
-- Alfred Whitney Griswold -
Books won't stay banned. They won't burn. Ideas won't go to jail
-- Alfred Whitney Griswold -
The dark side of life, and the horror of it, belonged to a world that lay remote from his own select little atmosphere of books and dreamings.
-- Algernon Blackwood -
When I am working on a painting, everything that I am thinking about at the time be it current events, the books I am reading, personal events, influences, emotions, etc. all find their way into my work.
-- Ali Banisadr -
Think about the way you go surfing on the Internet - you go from one thing to another. You can't really concentrate. I can't sit and read 10 pages on my computer. You'll read and then all of a sudden part of your brain is like, "What about that? ...You're not reading the whole book. You're reading fragments. Even though I think it's bad, I think it's interesting too, because that's the way my brain works.
-- Ali Banisadr -
As I work day after day, inspirations from different places go into the work. It's combination, but it's also comparative. I'll be reading two books at the same time that are totally different [and] then have two stories mix together.
-- Ali Banisadr -
Sometimes I forget when I read a book that it didn't exist in English first.
-- Ali Liebegott -
I feel very discouraged with the state of gay and lesbian publishing because I don't feel like we're really welcome in the mainstream and then you get ghettoized and put on some lesbian book club reading list where you don't want to be either.
-- Ali Liebegott -
In Courtney Moreno's In Case of Emergency the working class save the world and themselves. A wonderful first book!
-- Ali Liebegott -
Islam's biggest enemy is the Quran. If people learn what is in that book, Islam will be finished.
-- Ali Sina -
Books mean all possibilities. They mean moving out of yourself, losing yourself, dying of thirst and living to your full. They mean everything.
-- Ali Smith -
We'd never expect to understand a piece of music on one listen, but we tend to believe we've read a book after reading it just once.
-- Ali Smith -
A good argument, like a good dialogue, is always a proof of life, but I'd much rather go and read a book.
-- Ali Smith -
All we need to do, reader or writer, from first line to final page, is be as open as a book, and be alive to the life in language - on all its levels.
-- Ali Smith -
What shop did this book come from? she asked. Her father was looking worried at the cooker. He always got rice wrong. I don't know, Brooksie, he said, I don't remember. That was unimaginable, not remembering where a book has come from! and where it was bought from! That was part of the whole history, the whole point, of any book that you owned! And when you picked it up later in the house at home, you knew, you just knew by looking and having it in your hand, where it came from and where you got it and when and why you'd decided to buy it.
-- Ali Smith -
Shut up the door: who loves me must not look / Upon the withered world, but haste to bring / His lighted candle, and his story-book, / And live with me the poetry of spring.
-- Alice Cary -
I think I'm probably quite geeky in a lot of ways. I'm pretty into books, kind of obsessive about that.
-- Alice Eve -
It reminds me how funny living in LA can be; You go to a friend's barbecue and you leave the face of Victoria Beckham's look book.
-- Alice Greczyn -
I can think of no habit, kept up through the years, that binds a married couple more than that of reading good books together. Domestic problems and personal problems are for the time forgotten, and an intellectual intimacy is established that can be maintained in few other ways.
-- Alice Hegan Rice -
The worst thing in life is boredom. When people don't know what to do with themselves, they are very, very poor.
-- Alice Herz-Sommer -
All the characters in my books are imagined, but all have a bit of who I am in them - much like the characters in your dreams are all formed by who you are
-- Alice Hoffman -
He started to look at me in a manner I recognized: it was the way I looked at a new book, one I had never read before, one that surprised me with all it had to say.
-- Alice Hoffman -
If I can get on to my sofa and occupy myself for four hours, at intervals through the day, scribbling my notes, and able to read the books that belong to me, in that they clarify the density, and shape the formless mass within, life seems inconceivably rich...
-- Alice James -
What sense of superiority it gives one to escape reading some book which every one else is reading.
-- Alice James -
A book tour is, first and foremost, an exercise in humility.
-- Alice McDermott -
I read a book called The Art of Loving. A lot of things seemed clear while I was reading it but afterwards I went back to being more or less the same.
-- Alice Munro -
It is one of the strongest bonds, I think, that can spring up between people: sharing a passion for certain books and their authors.
-- Alice Steinbach -
The snag in being married to a person who knows more or less everything is that one gets hopelessly lazy. ... I never look things up in books because all I need to do is ask him, and when he gives me the answers I don't properly commit them to memory because I know if I forget all I have to do is to ask him again. It is rather like keeping one's brain in a suitcase.
-- Alice Thomas Ellis -
Love likes to extend itself. If you receive it in a book - or however you get it - then your duty is to extend it beyond.
-- Alice Walker -
Deliver me from writers who say the way they live doesn't matter. I'm not sure a bad person can write a good book, If art doesn't make us better, then what on earth is it for.
-- Alice Walker -
I love the combination of smartness, pain, and what one might call conscious postmodern trashiness in this book: a version of the erotic full of nervous tension which animates the sensuality, and also Zimroth's feeling for words, compressed, ironic, withholding, but also 'asking for it . . . the siege, the thrill, the battle fatigue.' A profoundly urban book, of harsh memory and fantasy, set in harsher reality.
-- Alicia Ostriker -
At first I was glad for the help. My freshmen English class, "Mythology and Archetypal Experience," confounded me. I didn't understand why we couldn't just read books without forcing contorted interpretations on then
-- Alison Bechdel -
When I was growing up in the 1960s, there was starting to be more books geared towards young adults.
-- Alison Bechdel -
People really want to think that these things really happened. I don't know why that is important, but I know that when I finish reading a novel or something, I want to know how much of that really happened to this author.
-- Alison Bechdel -
But I read comic books. I read things like Richie Rich and Little Lulu.
-- Alison Bechdel -
Nature can seem cruel, but she balances her books.
-- Alison Lurie -
If only they would all just leave me alone with my books and my letters, I would be content to let life, and the world pass me by
-- Alison Weir -
The Bible is one story that unfolds in one book, by one author, about one subject. A story that moves from promise to fulfillment.
-- Alistair Begg -
A Christian way of thinking is not just thinking Christian thoughts, singing Christian songs, reading Christian books, going to Christian schools; it is learning to think about the whole spectrum of life from the perspective of a mind that has been trained in truth.
-- Alistair Begg -
The Bible is one book, written by one Author, with one subject: Jesus Christ and the salvation God...provides through Him.
-- Alistair Begg -
There is even - as with no other game - a fascinating detective literature, a wry commentary on the human comedy, implicit in the book of rules.
-- Alistair Cooke -
I wrote each book in thirty-five days flat - just to get the darned thing finished.
-- Alistair Maclean -
For Calvin, the creation reflects its Creator at every point. Image after images flashed in front of our eyes, as Calvin attempts to convey the multiplicity of ways in which the creation witnesses to its Creator: it is like a visible garment, which the invisible God dons in order to make himself known; it is like a book in which the name on the Creator is written as its author; it is like a theater, in which the glory of God is publicly displayed; it is like a mirror, in which the works and wisdom of God are reflected.
-- Alister E. McGrath -
The failure to read good books both enfeebles the vision and strengthens our most fatal tendency - the belief that the here and now is all there is.
-- Allan Bloom -
The substance of my being has been informed by the books I learned to care for.
-- Allan Bloom -
Prayer is always acceptable to God when dictated by the heart, for the intention is everything in his sight; and the prayer of the heart is preferable to one read from a book, however beautiful it may be, if read with the lips rather than with the thought.
-- Allan Kardec -
It is one of the many merits of this admirable biography of Proust's mother that it invites one to return to the novel with perhaps a fuller understanding of Proust's heredity, hinterland, and upbringing. . . . This fascinating book is full of interesting social and cultural observation, of information about French Jewish life, the position of Jews in society and, of course, the Dreyfus case. But it is essentially a study of one of the most remarkable and fruitful of mother-son relationships. As such it is a book that every Proustian will want to read.
-- Allan Massie -
Today the crime novelist has one advantage denied to writers of 'straight' or 'literary' novels. Unlike them he can range over all levels of society, for crime can easily breach the barriers that exist in our stratified society. Because of these barriers the modern literary novel, unlike its 19th-century predecessors, is often confined to the horizontal, dealing only with one class. But crime runs through society from top to bottom, and so the crime novelist can present a fuller picture of the way we live now.
-- Allan Massie