Famous Quotes & Sayings

Dave Barry

The books all say that barracuda rarely eat people, but very few barracuda can read.

David Sylvian

I'm obsessed with books.

David Thewlis

It wasn't a good idea to work on 'Naked' in the first months of a marriage. I was living apart from my wife in a flat overflowing with books I was reading for the part.

David S. Goyer

I'm a big comic book geek and I've been reading comic books since pretty much since I was five or six in 1971 or something like that. So, I mean, I read it all and there's certainly a lot of different iterations of Superman that I personally have enjoyed more than others.

David Quammen

Of course anyone who truly loves books buys more of them than he or she can hope to read in one fleeting lifetime. A good book, resting unopened in its slot on a shelf, full of majestic potentiality, is the most comforting sort of intellectual wallpaper.

Carl Sagan

All of the books in the world contain no more information than is broadcast as video in a single large American city in a single year. Not all bits have equal value.

Carl Sagan

One glance at a book and you hear the voice of another person, perhaps someone dead for 1,000 years. To read is to voyage through time.

Carl Sagan

A book is proof that humans are capable of working magic.

Charles Caleb Colton

It is always easy to shut a book, but not quite so easy to get rid of a lettered coxcomb.

Charles Caleb Colton

If a book really wants the patronage of a great name, it is a bad book; and if it be a good book, it wants it not.

Charles Dickens

It can't be supposed," said Joe. "Tho' I'm oncommon fond of reading, too." Are you, Joe?" Oncommon. Give me," said Joe, "a good book, or a good newspaper, and sit me down afore a good fire, and I ask no better. Lord!" he continued, after rubbing his knees a little, "when you do come to a J and a O, and says you, 'Here, at last, is a J-O, Joe,' how interesting reading is!

Charles Dickens

We still leave unblotted in the leaves of our statute book, for the reverence and admiration of successive ages, the just and wholesome law which declares that the sturdy felon shall be fed and clothed, and that the penniless debtor shall be left to die of starvation and nakedness. This is no fiction.

Charles Stross

The dirty little secret of publishing is that, all along, each book sold has had an average of 5 readers. That's an 80% "piracy" rate if you insist on looking at it in those terms.

Charles Stross

Today, we see some "file sharing" sites that rely on fans uploading cracked copies of ebooks, and which then make money off those books by charging for downloads (via cash subscriptions or advertising). Again: I take a dim view of this. They're making money off the back of my work without paying me.

Charles Stross

Most established novelists are writing books informed by experiences gained in their youth. Middle age is not the best time to be changing smartphones every six months or adopting new technology platforms - because we tend to get slower and less accommodating to change as we age.

Charles Spurgeon

Master those books you have. Read them thoroughly. Bathe in them until they saturate you. Read and reread them…digest them. Let them go into your very self. Peruse a good book several times and make notes and analyses of it. A student will find that his mental constitution is more affected by one book thoroughly mastered than by twenty books he has merely skimmed. Little learning and much pride comes from hasty reading. Some men are disabled from thinking by their putting meditation away for the sake of much reading. In reading let your motto be ‘much not many.

Charles Spurgeon

God knows where every particle of the handful of dust has gone; he has marked in his book the wandering of every one of its atoms. He hath death so open before His view, that He can bring all these together, bone to bone, and clothe them with the very flesh that robed them in the days of yore, and make them live again.

Alan Watts

That's a waste of time. If you really understand Zen... you can use any book. You could use the Bible. You could use Alice in Wonderland. You could use the dictionary, because... the sound of the rain needs no translation.

Alan Rickman

Actors are agents of change. A film, a piece of theater, a piece of music, or a book can make a difference. It can change the world.

Alan Jay Lerner

We used to say that inside Cecil Beaton there was another Cecil Beaton sending out lots of little Cecils into the world. One did the sets, another did the costumes. A third took the photographs. Another put the sketches in an exhibition, then into magazines, then in a book.

Alan Colmes

Gary Berntsen, head of the CIA in Afghanistan there, he was a field commander. And he has a book out called "Jawbreaker." And he says we missed an opportunity at Tora Bora to get him. We put resources elsewhere. That's been a critique of the administration. Did we miss opportunities?

Alan Blinder

Life is not a multiple choice test, it's an open-book essay exam.

Alan Bradley

As I stood outside in Cow Lane, it occurred to me that Heaven must be a place where the library is open twenty-four hours a day, seven days a week. No ... eight days a week.

Alan Bennett

It was the kind of library he had only read about in books.

Alan Ball

I'm aware of 'Twilight,' but I've never seen the movies or read any of the books. Frankly, the story leaves me cold - why do a vampire story about abstinence?

Al Pacino

You'll never be alone if you’ve got a book.

Al Leiter

Pitches are like pages of a book; they're so important. The chess game; how I set you up early, and how I'll do it differently later.

Aiden Wilson Tozer

The best book is not one that informs merely, but one that stirs the reader up to inform himself.

Chris Adrian

It takes four angels to oversee an apocalypse: a recorder to make the book that would be scripture in the new world; a preserver to comfort and save those selected to be the first generation; an accuser to remind them why they suffer; and a destroyer to revoke the promise of survival and redemption, and to teach them the awful truth about furious sheltering grace.

Chris Abani

My books are often shelved around those of Chinua Achebe and Margaret Atwood, or Chimamanda Adichie and Monica Ali. All of this depends, of course, on the bookstore and how conversant the shelf stocker is with the alphabet.

Chip Kidd

I often get asked, 'Is the book dead?' It hasn't happened yet. It's different than music. Music was always meant to be pure sound - it started out as pure sound and now it's pure sound again. But books started out as things. Words on paper began as words on paper. The paperback book is the best technology to deliver that information to you.

China Mieville

Every book I write, the first thing I have to do is get into the voice, and the voice varies from book to book - that's part of what's interesting to me.

China Mieville

Personally I don't like it when writers become excessively proscriptive about the way that people read their books.