Famous Quotes & Sayings

H. L. Mencken

The book of Genesis, a farrago of nonsense so wholly absurd that even Sunday-school scholars have to be threatened with Hell to make them accept it.

H. L. Mencken

There are some people who read too much: the bibliobibuli. I know some who are constantly drunk on books, as other men are drunk on whiskey or religion. They wander through this most diverting and stimulating of worlds in a haze, seeing nothing and hearing nothing.

H. L. Mencken

It was morality that burned the books of the ancient sages, and morality that halted the free inquiry of the Golden Age and substituted for it the credulous imbecility of the Age of Faith. It was a fixed moral code and a fixed theology which robbed the human race of a thousand years by wasting them upon alchemy, heretic-burning , witchcraft and sacerdotalism.

H. L. Mencken

Some time ago a publisher told me that there are four kinds of books that seldom, if ever, lose money in the United States--first,murder stories; secondly, novels in which the heroine is forcibly overcome by the hero; thirdly, volumes on spiritualism, occultism and other such claptrap, and fourthly, books on Lincoln.

H. L. Mencken

I am never much interested in the effects of what I write....I seldom read with any attention the reviews of my...books. Two times out of three I know something about the reviewer, and in very few cases have I any respect for his judgments. Thus his praise, if he praises me, leaves me unmoved. I can't recall any review that has even influenced me in the slightest. I live in sort of a vacuum, and I suspect that most other writers do, too. It is hard to imagine one of the great ones paying any serious attention to contemporary opinion.

H. L. Mencken

I know some who are constantly drunk on books as other men are drunk on whiskey.

Guillermo Cabrera Infante

I have assiduously avoided calling my books novels

Guillermo Cabrera Infante

I describe my works as books, but my publishers in Spain, in the United States, and elsewhere insist on calling them novels

Guillermo Cabrera Infante

I first came out against Castro in June 1968, fifteen months after my book had been published, and you cannot imagine how quickly a void was created around me

Guillermo Cabrera Infante

Many of my books have begun with the title, because naming a work already in progress makes no sense to me.

Guillermo Cabrera Infante

I was able to read a movie before I was able to read a book

Guillermo del Toro

video games are the comic books of our time... It's a medium that gains no respect among the intelligentsia".

Greg Louganis

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

Grace Paley

That heartbreaking moment when you finish an amazing book, and you are forced to return to reality.

Grace Paley

Every time you finish something ... you figure you've finally learned to write, right? Then you start something else and it turns out you haven't. You have learned how to write that story, or that book, but you haven't learned how to write the next one.

J. R. Moehringer

Any book is better than no book. Slowly, surely, one will lead you to another, which will lead you to the best.

J. R. Martinez

I'm going to write a book, continue acting, continue motivational speaking and just share with people who I am and what I've learned in my second chance of life and pass it on to people in their first chance of life.

H. P. Lovecraft

The moon is dark, and the gods dance in the night; there is terror in the sky, for upon the moon hath sunk an eclipse foretold in no books of men or of earth's gods.

H. P. Lovecraft

I have dwelt ever in realms apart from the visible world; spending my youth and adolescence in ancient and little-known books, and in roaming the fields and groves of the region near my ancestral home. I do not think that what I read in these books or saw in these fields and groves was exactly what other boys read and saw there; but of this I must say little, since detailed speech would but confirm those cruel slanders upon my intellect which I sometimes overhear from the whispers of the stealthy attendants around me.

Grant Heslov

We usually break the story first. For instance, on The Monuments Men, and this one is more complicated because there's a lot of history, so before we started, we sat down with Robert Edsel, the author of the book, for about a week, and basically, he just gave us a lecture and went through everything. And then, I had a researcher, somebody who we had actually used on Argo.

Grant Morrison

Unlike novel characters, comic book characters last an eternity. When a character is changed beyond recognition, there's no longer the merchandising aspect.

Grant Morrison

Write comic books if you love comic books so much that you want to write them. Don't write them like movies. Comics can do a lot of things that movies can't do, and vice versa.

Georg C. Lichtenberg

I look upon book reviews as an infantile disease which new-born books are subject to.

Georg C. Lichtenberg

One of our forefathers must have read a forbidden book.

Georg C. Lichtenberg

To read means to borrow; to create out of one s readings is paying off one's debts.

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

I ceased in the year 1764 to believe that one can convince one’s opponents with arguments printed in books. It is not to do that, therefore, that I have taken up my pen, but merely so as to annoy them, and to bestow strength and courage on those on our own side, and to make it known to the others that they have not convinced us.

Georg C. Lichtenberg

If we thought more for ourselves we would have very many more bad books and very many more good ones.

Georg C. Lichtenberg

When a book and a head collide and a hollow sound is heard, must it always have come from the book?

Georg C. Lichtenberg

It is a sure evidence of a good book if it pleases us more and more as we grow older.

Georg C. Lichtenberg

The book which most deserved to be banned would be a catalog of banned books.

Georg C. Lichtenberg

A sure sign of a good book is that you like it more the older you get.

Georg C. Lichtenberg

There can hardly be a stranger commodity in the world than books. Printed by people who don't understand them; sold by people who don't understand them; bound, criticized and read by people who don't understand them; and now even written by people who don't understand them.