Famous Quotes & Sayings

Thomas Carlyle

In books lies the soul of the whole past time.

F. H. Bradley

The mood in which my book was conceived and executed, was in fact to some extent a passing one.

Joseph O'Neill

When I read James Joyce, I'm not really interested in the Dublin of 1904. I'm interested in being in the presence of a voice and a sensibility underpinned by an authenticity which, I think, if you're a good writer, you can extract from the specific details of your own time. I think most writers do hope that their books will be read in ten years.

Italo Calvino

How much energy is wasted in Italy in trying to write the novel that obeys all the rules. The energy might have been useful to provide us with more modest, more genuine things, that had less pretensions: short stories, memoirs, notes, testimonials, or at any rate, books that are open, without a preconceived plan.

There are seventy million books in American libraries, but the one you want is always out.

Christopher Moore

The reason I'm writing funny books is that I wish there were more.

Christian Kane

You can read books on stuff all day long, but until you get out there and just do it, if you want to start playing, and you want to make some music, then go out and play. Go find yourself a venue and play, even if it's in your home. Just play every day. You win the fight by fighting.

Dav Pilkey

These 'mistakes' occur in my books for a reason. I have an agenda: I'm secretly trying to inspire kids to create their own stories and comics, and I don't want them to feel stifled by 'perfectionism.'

Barney Frank

Pat Moynihan could write books with one hand and legislate with the other. I can't; I have a short attention span. The slightest distraction would take me away from writing.

Barry Eisler

I want to position my books as premium-priced versions on the reasonably-priced scale, if that makes sense, to find a sweet spot between the high-end of what my brand can support and the low end that results in impulse purchases and maximum sales volume.

Al Sharpton

It is up to us to change laws on the books like 'Stand Your Ground' laws and push elected officials to enact regulations that hold police officers to the same standards as the rest of society. This is why we vote.

My wife likes me to point out that she puts our daughter down to sleep more often than I do, which gives me time to write stupid books about it.

Susan Campbell Bartoletti

Both types of books - fiction and nonfiction - are a search for story. As a writer and a reader, there's nothing I crave more than a good story!

Satya Nadella

The one thing that I would say that defines me is I love to learn. I get excited about new things. I buy more books than I read or finish.

Haruki Murakami

Many people tell me that they don 't know what to feel when they finish one of my books because the story was dark, or complicated, or strange. But while they were reading it, they were inside my world and they were happy. That's good.

Greg van Eekhout

The stakes in my books tend to be kind of ridiculously high. In 'Kid vs. Squid,' the question is whether or not the California coast will be subsumed by the ocean in favor of the creation of a new Atlantis. In 'The Boy at the End of the World,' what's at stake is the survival of the human species.

Greg van Eekhout

I feel lucky that my career so far has included books for adults and books for kids. They're equally important to me, and I hope I get to continue writing both.

A couple of weeks after that, Zebra Books phoned with an offer, and I accepted.

LZ Granderson

My son was born during my last semester in college. His due date was Thanksgiving, but he didn't show up until finals week. I brought my books to the hospital and didn't think anything of it. That is what a father is supposed to do.

Emily Watson

I was a pretentious child. I grew up without a television. I read a lot of books and I loved Shakespeare. Still do.

Eddie Trunk

I think that, for me, the great books like that, autobiographies, are great when the artists who write them throw caution to the wind and really put it out there as they saw it.

Grace Lin

The early readers are in-between books for the kids who aren't ready for novels yet but are done with my picture books. It's really rewarding to think that they can grow up reading my books at all the different levels.

Graeme Simsion

I am a big advocate of the role of the bookstore in the community.

Kyle Busch

We're trying to get there. It would be exciting to put our names in the record books as brothers.

Erich Segal

I wrote 'Yellow Submarine' for the Beatles. I wrote the screenplay for 'The Games,' about the Olympic Games. I wrote 'Love Story,' both the novel and the screenplay. I wrote 'RPM' for Stanley Kramer. Plus, I wrote two scholarly books and a 400-page translation from the Latin, and I dated June Wilkinson!

John Irving

I grew up around books - my grandmother's house, where I lived as a small child, was full of books. My father was a history teacher, and he loved the Russian novels. There were always books around.

Jane Seymour

I learn my lines while on the golf course. I try to do two or three things at once. I have ideas for books all the time, I have ideas for paintings all the time, and I write them all down. I take my sketchpad and my iPad, which I design on, and I do sit down and do specific tasks at specific times.

I owe a great debt to motor-racing, and the first place I went to in Europe when I was 20 was Italy, and I was extremely influenced by it in books until I got there.

Gregory Keyes

It takes a while to get a movie together, and they don't start talking books until the movie is close to being finished.

Brian Selznick

A lot of times, people complain about how books and stories change when they're translated to the screen. But I think sometimes people forget that a lot of changes have to be made because we're not in a book when we're watching a movie.

Bindi Irwin

I like cups of tea and reading books and poetry and old people things.

Andy Kindler

I've sold a lot of different product. Very briefly, I sold Time Life Books on the phone.

Amy Bloom

Smart people often talk trash about happiness and worse than trash about books on happiness, and they have been doing so for centuries - just as long as other people have been pursuing happiness and writing books about it.