"Books want to be born: I never make them. They come to me and insist on being written, and on being such and such."
Read quote
9 likes
Book quotes
Book
21K quotes on this topic — from poets, philosophers, and thinkers across history.
Explore further
Topics related to Book
Browse quotes that often appear alongside book — connected by shared ideas and recurring themes.
Quote collection
Book quotes (page 67 of 1049)
Follow a thought to its author, or read the full quote page.
"I don't think anyone should be banned. If you don't like a book, set it aside."
Read quote
9 likes
"Well, certainly the Voynich Manuscript is the 'limit text' of Western occultism. No one can read it. It is truly an occult book."
Read quote
9 likes
"What is written without effort is in general read without pleasure."
Read quote
9 likes
"It is advantageous to an author that his book should be attacked as well as praised. Fame is a shuttlecock. If it be struck at one end of the room, it will soon fall to the ground. To keep it up, it must be struck at both ends."
Read quote
9 likes
"The greatest part of a writer's time is spent in reading in order to write. A man will turn over half a library to make a book."
Read quote
9 likes
"The mind is refrigerated by interruption; the thoughts are diverted from the principle subject; the reader is weary, he suspects not why; and at last throws away the book, which he has too diligently studied."
Read quote
9 likes
"You may translate books of science exactly. ... The beauties of poetry cannot be preserved in any language except that in which it was originally written."
Read quote
9 likes
"Exactness is first obtained, and afterwards elegance. But diction, merely vocal, is always in its childhood. As no man leaves his eloquence behind him, the new generations have all to learn. There may possibly be books without a polished language, but there can be no polished language without books."
Read quote
9 likes
"At last she shut the book sharply, lay back, and drew a deep breath, expressive of the wonder which always marks the transition from the imaginary world to the real world."
Read quote
9 likes
"The stories never said why she was wicked. It was enough to be an old woman, enough to be all alone, enough to look strange because you have no teeth. It was enough to be called a witch. If it came to that, the book never gave you the evidence of anything. It talked about "a handsome prince"... was he really, or was it just because he was a prince that people called handsome? As for "a girl who was as beautiful as the day was long"... well, which day? In midwinter it hardly ever got light! The stories don't want you to think, they just wanted you to believe what you were told."
Read quote
9 likes
"All I am really promoting in the books is the Golden Rule, which I hope everybody knows to be "do as you would be done by." It has one or 2 flaws, but it is a good soundbite. Evil starts when you treat other people as things. There are perhaps worse crimes, but they begin when you treat other people as things."
Read quote
9 likes
"And Sam Vimes thought: Why is Young Sam's nursery full of farmyard animals anyway? Why are his books full of moo-cows and baa-lambs? He is growing up in the city. He will only see them on a plate! They go sizzle!"
Read quote
9 likes
"And therefore education at the University mostly worked by the age-old method of putting a lot of young people in the vicinity of a lot of books and hoping that something would pass from one to the other, while the actual young people put themselves in the vicinity of inns and taverns for exactly the same reason."
Read quote
9 likes
"Mum had done everything you need to educate a kid. She made me a kid who likes books and she told me about 'Wind in the Willows' and read it and I thought this is weird, Rat, Mole, Toad and my first ever Bolshie thought - you know about 'The Wind in the Willows.'"
Read quote
9 likes
"I sometimes get up at night when I can't sleep and walk down into my library and open one of my books and read a paragraph and say, 'My God, did I write that?"
Read quote
9 likes
"The magic is only in what books say, how they stitched the patches of the universe together into one garment for us."
Read quote
9 likes
"In your reading, find books to improve your color sense, your sense of shape and size in the world."
Read quote
9 likes
"My personal telephone book is a book of the dead now. I'm so old. Almost all of my friends have died, and I don't have the guts to take their names out of the book."
Read quote
9 likes
"Anything too stupid to be said is sung."
Read quote
9 likes