Book quotes
21K quotes on this topic — from poets, philosophers, and thinkers across history.
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Browse quotes that often appear alongside book — connected by shared ideas and recurring themes.
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"I want to force myself again and again to leave the warmth and security of static situations and move into the world of growth and suffering where the real books are people's minds and souls."
"The early commentators who put down the pre-presidential Roosevelt as an empty-headed young lightweight, all ambition and no talent, now seem comically wrong to a modern book-reading, movie-going, television-watching, legend-loving American public conditioned to think of him as one of the presidential giants on the order of Washington and Lincoln."
"I read the bible often, not just to prepare for "Noah". I believe it is a very important book."
"The way I feel about every book is this: you don't finish it, you abandon it. All of my books have in some sense failed, otherwise I wouldn't write another one. If I wrote the perfect book, I wouldn't have to write again, and I wouldn't want to. That's not true for everyone, but it's true for me. I could walk away then. But so far I haven't managed to do it."
"I get letters from two kinds of readers. History buffs, who love to read history and biography for fun, and then kids who want to be writers but who rarely come out and say so in their letters. You can tell by the questions they ask - How did you get your first book published? How long do you spend on a book? So I guess those are the readers that I'm writing for - kids who enjoy that kind of book, because they're interested in history, in other people's lives, in what has happened in the world. I believe that they're the ones who are going to be the movers and shakers."
"With the audience I write for, I want to make sure that the reader is eagerly turning every page. I want each of my books to be an absorbing reading experience, an authentic piece of literature. The worst thing that can happen is for a book to have a chilling effect on the reader, to have a kid pick it up and look at a bunch of footnotes and think, No, I'm not going to read this, it's too intimidating."
"Anyone writing a picture-book biography of Lincoln has a different set of responsibilities from someone writing a biography for sixth-graders, say, or from a Lincoln scholar writing an academic book on Lincoln. Each of these writers has a different audience and different goals. That's obvious."
"I'd like to ask Eleanor Roosevelt what she regrets most, because I think that might reveal something that I didn't catch on to while I was writing my book and, hopefully, that would start a conversation."
"When I write a book, I don't have a plan or an outline. The characters move the action, and the action develops the characters. When I write a book, I become an actor, really, taking the role of the person who is speaking or acting at the time, and so their reactions to whatever they see are my reactions."
"I mean, of course, I love sci-fi and stuff like that, but I'm not, like, a comic book crazy guy."
"The book 'Do You!' is about your inner voice. And when you connect to that voice then you - then the freedom comes. And we're only here to be happy. So happy makes money. Money doesn't make happy."
"I've always remembered this quote from a book that I read as a kid. It was something along the lines of "What's scary is not necessarily what goes bump in the night, but that which whispers at midday." And I've always held that. The day can just be as scary as night."
"I don't think it's necessarily 100-percent true. But comic books have infiltrated the mainstream Hollywood in ways that I don't think I ever would have seen or thought imaginable a while ago. But it's also cyclical. You saw it in the '80s when it became kind of huge again. And then it disappears for a while, then it comes back again, then it disappears for a while. So yeah, there's something about that."
"The R.I.P.D. picture is like a graphic novel, I guess. I don't know if it's like a typical kind of comic book. But there is great source material for those kinds of films."
"I read the 'Deadpool' series back in the '90s. I'm not, like, a huge comic book reader, per say, though. I'll check out 'Archie' when I'm in the grocery line, but that's about it."
"There will never again be a day exactly like today. There will never again be a moment exactly like this moment. After my next birthday, I will never again be the age I am right now. After midnight tonight, today will be part of history. Someday I'll be dying and I'll wish I'd done all the things I want to do now. Someday I'll be dead and I won't be able to do anything. But today, right now, I'm alive. And yet I'm writing nonsense on the back of my literature book. But I'm alive. And yet I'm just sitting here. But I'm alive."
"The secret to writing sound effects is having a room you can be alone in, trying to make the sounds yourself, and seeing what comes out. It's similar to if you're writing a character talking with their mouth full: the only way I know to transcribe that is to stuff my fist in my mouth and write down what sounds I make when I try to talk."
"What I didn't say was that each time I picked up a German dictionary or a German book, the very sight of those dense, black, barbed-wire letters made my mind shut like a clam."
"The reason I haven't been writing in this book for so long is partly that I haven't had one decent coherent thought to put down."
"Mark Tobey fills his canvases with elliptical, calligraphic lines, beautiful whirls that seem at first glance to be completely abstract and to come from nowhere at all except his own subjective musing. But I shall never forget how struck I was, on visiting Tobey's studio one day, to see strewn around books on astronomy and photographs of the Milky Way. I knew then that Tobey experiences the movement of the stars and solar constellations as the external pole of his encounter."
