Famous Quotes & Sayings

John Dos Passos

The only excuse for a novelist, aside from the entertainment and vicarious living his books give the people who read them, is as a sort of second-class historian of the age he lives in. The "reality" he missed by writing about imaginary people, he gains by being able to build a reality more nearly out of his own factual experience than a plain historian or biographer can.

John Dos Passos

The Enormous Room seems to me to be the book that has nearest approached the mood of reckless adventure in which men will reach the white heat of imagination needed to fuse the soggy disjointed complexity of the industrial life about us into seething fluid of creation. There can be no more playing safe.

John Donne

All mankind is of one author, and is one volume; when one man dies, one chapter is not torn out of the book, but translated into a better language; and every chapter must be so translated....As therefore the bell that rings to a sermon, calls not upon the preacher only, but upon the congregation to come: so this bell calls us all....No man is an island, entire of itself...any man's death diminishes me, because I am involved in mankind; and therefore never send to know for whom the bell tolls; it tolls for thee.

John Donne

He that desires to print a book, should much more desire, to be a book.

John Dunning

There is no better indicators of character than the books you have.

John Edgar Wideman

I don't write books because I have answers. I write books because I have questions. What we are is the questions that we ask, not the answers that we provide. It's all about the process of self-examination. I think that's what the best writing always contains.

John Ortberg

We who preach have one tool. We are people of the book.

John O'Donohue

A book is a path of words which takes the heart in new directions.

John Mulaney

Ill book a ticket on some garbage airline. I dont wanna name an actual airline so lets make one up, lets just call it like Delta Airlines

John Mortimer

There's more of yourself in a book than a play. that's why we know all about Dickens and not much about Shakespeare. Ben Jonson murdered people; Marlowe was a spy; Shakespeare just sat in the corner and took notes.

John Mortimer

The officers of the branch of the Force (the Obscene Publications Squad) have a discouraging club tie, on which a book is depicted being cut in half by a larger pair of scissors.

John Milton

A good book is the precious lifeblood of a master spirit.

John Milton

He who destroys a good book kills reason itself.

John Denham

Books should to one of these fours ends conduce, for wisdom, piety, delight, or use.

John Dewey

A book or a letter may institute a more intimate association between human beings separated thousands of miles from each other than exists between dwellers under the same roof.

John Berendt

The megaselling books by celebrities are not so much books as products.

John Berger

It can happen that a book, unlike its authors, grows younger as the years pass.

Johann Georg Hamann

The product of paper and printed ink, that we commonly call the book, is one of the great visible mediators between spirit and time, and, reflecting zeitgeist, lasts as long as ore and stone.

Joe Haldeman

Bad books on writing tell you to "WRITE WHAT YOU KNOW", a solemn and totally false adage that is the reason there exist so many mediocre novels about English professors contemplating adultery.

Joe Greene

When all is said and done and the e-book is written about politics and the Internet, it is not going to be about the presidential election. It will be about the smaller elections in aggregate that have a huge effect on people's lives.

Joan Rivers

There are many self-help books by Ph.D.s, but I hold a different degree: an I.B.T.I.A.-I've Been Through It All. This degree comes not on parchment but gauze, and it entitles me to tell you that there is a way to get through any misfortune.

Joan Rivers

What are people going to do? Fire me? I've been fired before. Not book me? I've been out of work before. I don't care.

George Akerlof

Some time ago a little-known Scottish philosopher wrote a book on what makes nations succeed and what makes them fail. The Wealth of Nations is still being read today. With the same perspicacity and with the same broad historical perspective, Daron Acemoglu and James Robinson have retackled this same question for our own times. Two centuries from now our great-great- . . . -great grandchildren will be, similarly, reading Why Nations Fail.

Geoff Thompson

I have a passion for words. I love words. And I'm just learning and developing my skills for words. I do books and I do journalism and plays. I have a broad palette. I don't have a great eye for direction. I love working with actors and I work very well with them because I appreciate what they bring to the table. I'd never say never, of course, but I look at it and don't really fancy it. I want to try and master the word side of it first.

Geoff Thompson

I wrote my first book in a toilet in a factory where I was a floor sweeper.

Geoff Johns

I'm excited for everybody to see the books. In Justice League #15, there's a lot of other stuff too that's setup in this storyline that's going to explore Superman and Wonder Woman and Cyborg. Cyborg has a huge role in this story, actually, that sends him on a new path as well.

Geoff Johns

Re-introducing Aquaman and getting him to a place like that and then ultimately having him headline a Justice League storyline that crosses over between his book and Justice League really is the culmination of where we've been going with the character since the beginning. His role in this will change the Justice League storyline, it will change him, and it will send them both in new directions.

Geoff Mulgan

A lot of people in government don't really read books at all.

Geoff Mulgan

A tablet replacing an exercise book is not innovation, it's just a different way to make notes.

Garrison Keillor

There was a price to be paid for being interested in fiction and in writing, pushing my family away. Books and authors became my family.

Garrison Keillor

Nothing that readers say or do strikes me as a nuisance. Anyone who cracks open a book of mine is, to me, a gem.

Garrison Keillor

Minnesota is a state of public-spirited and polite people, where you can get a good cappucino and eat Thai food and find any book you want and yet live on a quiet tree-lined street with a backyard and send your kids to public school. When a state this good hits the jackpot, it can only be an inspiration to everybody.

Garrison Keillor

This is the big reason most humorists fail. Drunks don't read books.