"My children give me a great sense of wonder. Just to see them develop into these extraordinary human beings. And a favorite book as a child? Growing up, it was 'The Lion, The Witch and The Wardrobe' - I would read the whole C.S. Lewis series out loud to my kids. I was once reading to Zelda, and she said 'don't do any voices. Just read it as yourself.' So I did, I just read it straight, and she said 'that's better.'"
Book quotes
Book
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Book quotes (page 41 of 1049)
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"You know people are always putting Ulysses in the top 10 books ever written but I doubt that any of those people were really moved by it."
"What really knocks me out is a book that, when you're all done reading it, you wish the author that wrote it was a terrific friend of yours and you could call him up on the phone whenever you felt like it. That doesn't happen much, though."
"In the end all books are written for your friends. The problem after writing One Hundred Years of Solitude was that now I no longer know whom of the millions of readers I am writing for; this upsets and inhibits me. It's like a million eyes are looking at you and you don't really know what they think."
"I've often thought that my scruples about stealing books were the only thing that stood in the way of my being a really great scholar."
"In the last 1,000 years, the Arabs have translated as many books as Spain translates in just one year."
"Every reader finds himself. The writer's work is merely a kind of optical instrument that makes it possible for the reader to discern what, without this book, he would perhaps never have seen in himself."
"I do not know a better cure for mental illness than a book."
"Every new book I read comes to be a part of that overall and unitary book that is the sum of my readings...if you need little to set the imagination going, I require even less: the promise of reading is enough."
"I've never been a fast reader. I'm fickle; I don't finish books I start; I put a book aside for five, ten years and then take it up again."
"Printed books usually outlive bookstores and the publishers who brought them out. They sit around, demanding nothing, for decades. That's one of their nicest qualities - their brute persistence."
"People die, but books never die."
"Of all things I liked books best."
"A dollar put into a book and a book mastered might change the whole course of a boy's life. It might easily be the beginning of the development of leadership that would carry the boy far in service to his fellow men."
"If you invent two or three people and turn them loose in your manuscript, something is bound to happen to them -- you can't help it; and then it will take you the rest of the book to get them out of the natural consequences of that occurrence, and so first thing you know, there's your book all finished up and never cost you an idea."
"What a good thing Adam had. When he said a good thing he knew nobody had said it before."
"I go too long without picking up a good book, I feel like I've done nothing useful with my life."
"The tree I had in the garden as a child, my beech tree, I used to climb up there and spend hours. I took my homework up there, my books, I went up there if I was sad, and it just felt very good to be up there among the green leaves and the birds and the sky."
"All mankind is of one author, and is one volume; when one man dies, one chapter is not torn out of the book, but translated into a better language; and every chapter must be so translated....As therefore the bell that rings to a sermon, calls not upon the preacher only, but upon the congregation to come: so this bell calls us all....No man is an island, entire of itself...any man's death diminishes me, because I am involved in mankind; and therefore never send to know for whom the bell tolls; it tolls for thee."
"I guess there are never enough books."