Book quotes
21K quotes on this topic — from poets, philosophers, and thinkers across history.
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"Favorite books and authors while growing up - I'd need a book to list them all. For the sake of brevity: Shakespeare, Dickens, Mark Twain, Victor Hugo, world's mythology, the Arthurian legends. And the unabridged dictionary. And they're still my favorites. They get better each time I read them."
"I am not really interested in the comic book movies for example. They send me very violent scripts that don't interest me. One I was sent involved me playing a woman, a mother and wife who gets killed, shot in the stomach. It was a thriller and it did not excite me at all. So I turned it down."
"'Til 1983, I wrote primarily for other psychologists and expected that they would be the principal audience for my book."
"The reading or non-reading a book will never keep down a single petticoat."
"I am not read well, but when I do read, I read well."
"But by accident, not by cunning calculation, books, because of their weight and texture, and because of their sweetly token resistance to manipulation, involve our hands and eyes, and then our minds and souls, in a spiritual adventure I would be very sorry for my grandchildren not to know about."
"There is this thing called the university, and everybody goes there now. And there are these things called teachers who make students read this book with good ideas or that book with good ideas until that's where we get our ideas. We don't think them; we read them in books. I like Utopian talk, speculation about what our planet should be, anger about what our planet is. I think writers are the most important members of society, not just potentially but actually. Good writers must have and stand by their own ideas."
"The book was Maniacs in the Fourth Dimension, by Kilgore Trout. It was about people whose mental diseases couldn't be treated because the causes of the diseases were all in the fourth dimension, and three-dimensional Earthling doctors couldn't see those causes at all, or even imagine them."
"Honest to God, Bill, the way things are going, all I can think of is that I'm a character in a book by somebody who wants to write about somebody who suffers all the time."
"People who are wary of what they might find in a book if they opened one are right to be."
"When I was working on my career, I was very aware of what I had done, what I wanted to do next. I'm having a good time just reading things that might be interesting to do."
"Only in books do we learn what’s really going on."
"Never index your own book."
"That's what my books are, now that I'm a grownup - mosaics of jokes."
"Nothing in this book is true."
"I am beguiled by your physical beauty, and I am moved by how head-over-heels in love with books you are. And nowhere else have I found such thoughtful and literate reportage on the state of the American soul, as that soul makes itself known in the books we write."
"I was hoping to build a country and add to its literature. That's why I served in World War II, and that's why I wrote books."
"How important my books are or anybody's books are, I don't know. I don't think they are terribly important I think that they make people contented during the period they are reading them and this is worth something is to take care of somebody for a couple of hours."
"It sucks to try and book a tour without the internet, and I'm not even doing it."
"I was kind of relieved with the way the book [The Proud Highway] came out. It's beyond an autobiography or a biography. I never knew what was going to come up next."
