Famous Quotes & Sayings

Irvin D. Yalom

None of my patients are really troubled by the idea that some part of what they say might be in a book in the future. Some have expressed the very opposite feeling--the fear that they would not be interesting enough to write about.

Irvine Welsh

I'd always liked to read, but when I picked up books I wasn't getting the same kind of excitement from them that I was from going out clubbing. I wanted to get the same kind of feel.

Irvine Welsh

Every kind of book I've written has been written in a different way. There has not been any set time for writing, any set way, I haven't re-invented the process every time but I almost have.

Irvine Welsh

It's different in Scotland. People who come to readings are more interested in literature as such, but the readership in general is really quite diverse. It's a cliche, but it's said that people who read my books don't read any other books, and you do get that element.

Irvine Welsh

Basically, particularly in Britain, it's a hegemonic thing that people who write tend to come from the leisure classes. They can afford the time and the books.

Iris Murdoch

I live, I live, with an absolutely continuous sense of failure. I am always defeated, always. Every book is the wreck of a perfect idea. The years pass and one has only one life. If one has a thing at all one must do it and keep on and on and on trying to do it better.

Iris Murdoch

any writer is inevitably going to work with his own anxieties and desires. If the book is any good it has got to have in it the fire of a personal unconscious mind.

Iris Murdoch

Every book is the wreck of a perfect idea.

Imre Kertesz

I tried to depict the human face of this history, I wanted to write a book that people would actually want to read.

Immanuel Velikovsky

Mankind in Amnesia has to do not only with the past, like my other books -- primarily it has to do with the future, a future not removed by thousands or tens of thousands of years, but the imminent future, on whose threshold we now stand.

Imogen Cunningham

You know, a documentary is only interesting once in a while. If you look at a whole book of Dorothea [Lange]'s where she has row after row of people bending over and digging out carrots - that can be very tedious. And so it's only once in a while that something happens that is worth doing.

Ilka Chase

I suppose anyone who has ever written a travel book has had the experience of being accosted by a reader with blood in his eye and a lawsuit in his voice.

Ichiro Suzuki

I'm not a big guy and hopefully kids could look at me and see that I'm not muscular and not physically imposing, that I'm just a regular guy. So if somebody with a regular body can get into the record books, kids can look at that. That would make me happy.

Idries Shah

Scholars of the East and West have heroically consecrated their whole working lives to making available, by means of their own disciplines, Sufi literary and philosophical material to the world at large. In many cases they have faithfully recorded the Sufis' own reiteration that the Way of the Sufis cannot be understood by means of the intellect or by ordinary book learning.

Idries Shah

The Way of the Sufis cannot be understood by means of the intellect or by ordinary book learning.

Idries Shah

Please, not again what you studied, how long you spent at it, how many books you wrote, what people thought of you - but: what did you learn?

Hunter Parrish

I cry at the end of every book.

Huston Smith

Most of the book deals with things we already know yet never learn.

Gregory Maguire

Of course. You get everything from books.

Gregory Maguire

I had written childrens books for 14 years before I published Wicked. And none of them were poorly reviewed, and none of them sold enough for me to be able to buy a bed.

Gregory Maguire

Books fall open, you fall in. When you climb out again, you're a bit larger than you used to be.

Gloria Stuart

I just finished my 11th book last week, so I'm ready to start the next one.

Gloria Stuart

I have a private press. I'm a book artist. I publish books of other authors and artists. I do the illustrating. I set the type. I print it myself on my press. I do everything but bind it.

Gloria Vanderbilt

When I'm traveling to promote my book, I feel like an artful impostor. What I really am is when I'm in my (painter's) studio and when I'm writing. With actors, it's the same thing. They're kind of artful impostors in public. When you get to know them, they're different people.

Gloria Swanson

I've given my memoirs far more thought than any of my marriages. You can't divorce a book.

James Gleick

As a technology, the book is like a hammer. That is to say, it is perfect: a tool ideally suited to its task. Hammers can be tweaked and varied but will never go obsolete. Even when builders pound nails by the thousand with pneumatic nail guns, every household needs a hammer. Likewise, the bicycle is alive and well. It was invented in a world without automobiles, and for speed and range it was quickly surpassed by motorcycles and all kinds of powered scooters. But there is nothing quaint about bicycles. They outsell cars.

James Gleick

I can't remember the last book that taught me so much, and so well, about what it means to be human.

James Frey

The Bible was written two thousand years ago. The world is a different place now. Stories that had meaning then are meaningless now. Beliefs that might have been valid then are invalid now. Those books should be looked at in the same way we look at anything of that age with interest with an acknowledgement of the historical importance but they should not be thought of as anything that has any value.

Isaac Marion

It's rare that I read more than two or three books by any one author; usually only one.

Hugh Leonard

It's a natural thing for people to say, you know, Who's in this book? I find myself get ting a little defensive. People come along and I'm waiting for that first question.

Greg Louganis

I've learned at the book signings that everyone has obstacles.

Georg C. Lichtenberg

A writer who wishes to be read by posterity must not be averse to putting hints which might give rise to whole books, or ideas for learned discussions, in some corner of a chapter so that one should think he can afford to throw them away by the thousand.

Georg C. Lichtenberg

A book which, above all others in the world, should be forbidden, is a catalogue of forbidden books.