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 get angry about stuff, I get very emotionally intense about stuff and that's how I get it out - with books, with the band, on my own onstage, but it's always kind of a wail."
"I like the idea of someone else’s love safely sealed in a song or a book."
"I'm not into fame. I'm not into making money, outside of financing my books. I'm not into status. My thing is basically about time - not wasting it."
"Not that the writers weren't good. I believe in those books and those writers very much. It's just that in the climate it's really hard to keep the lights on and the doors open when you're selling poetry and literature that appeals to a fringe audience."
"That's the only interaction I have with people, those talking shows. Most of the people in my phone book are artists, management, producers, engineers. I don't ever call people with, "Hi! How are you?" I say, "How are you? Do you have that 16/30 ready? When do you want me to come into the studio?" That's what I do."
"My mother taught me how to read very early on and at school I was ahead of everyone in class... Reading was always something that I liked because I could do it alone and I was alone a lot of the time with my mother working the hours she did. Books became my friends very early on."
"Everyone should have the right to go off and do their music or do their books. The people who are in the position to censor they're really not down to reality where that certain artists are coming from."
"The fact is that I am always thinking of something to build. A new book, radio show, plans for a trip somewhere. I am not a very happy person but I feel pretty even when I am working, so I guess that is how I am wired."
"As far as poetry, I don't know if I've ever written any. I've read a lot. I just write and it comes out in different forms and shapes. I don't know if I'm any good at it I just really go for it and I'm very prolific book wise only because I own the company. No one tells me 'no' around here."
"There are favorable hours for reading a book, as for writing it."
"Alas! it is not till time, with reckless hand, has torn out half the leaves from the Book of Human Life to light the fires of passion with from day to day, that man begins to see that the leaves which remain are few in number."
"Books are sepulchres of thought."
"Very early in my life I took the question of the relation of art to truth seriously: even now I stand in holy dread in the face of this discordance. My first book was devoted to it. The Birth of Tragedy believes in art on the background of another belief"
"Books for general reading always smell bad; the odor of common people hangs around them."
"It was a subtle refinement of God to learn Greek when he wished to write a book – and that he did not learn it better."
"A book full of brilliance imparts some of it even to its opponents."
"Books for all the world are always foul-smelling books: the smell of small people clings to them."
"Ultimately, no one can extract from things, books included, more than he already knows."
"Writers ought to be regarded as wrongdoers who deserve to be acquitted or pardoned only in the rarest cases: that would be a way to keep books from getting out of hand."
"The value of many men and books rests solely on their faculty for compelling all to seek out the most hidden and intimate things."
