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 always feel like an idiot every time I fly first class because I’m a kid. And I just sit there, and everyone’s got their newspapers and they’re on the computer, and I’m like, 'Can I get a coloring book, please? Can I get some crayons?'"
"The trick in writing children's books is to set up danger, mystery and excitement on page one. Force the kid to turn the page . . . Then in the middle of each chapter there's a dramatic point of excitement, and at chapter's end, a cliffhanger."
"To understand oneself requires patience, tolerant awareness; the self is a book of many volumes which you cannot read in a day, but when once you begin to read, you must read every word, every sentence, every paragraph for in them are the intimations of the whole. The beginning of it is the ending of it. If you know how to read, supreme wisdom is to be found."
"You go into the office and take a book or two from the shelves. You read a few lines, like your life depended on reading 'em right. But you know your life doesn't depend on anything that makes sense, and you wonder where in the hell you got the idea it did; and you begin to get sore."
"I can tell you, honest friend, what to believe: believe life; it teaches better that book or orator."
"If a man writes a book, let him set down only what he knows. I have guesses enough of my own."
"Late in the winter of my seventeenth year, my mother decided I was depressed, presumably because I rarely left the house, spent quite a lot of time in bed, read the same book over and over, ate infrequently, and devoted quite a bit of my abundant free time to thinking about death."
"Books belong to their readers."
"Tell me my copy is missing the last twenty pages or something. Hazel Grace, tell me I have not reached the end of this book. OH MY GOD DO THEY GET MARRIED OR NOT OH MY GOD WHAT IS THIS?!"
"I put things down on sheets of paper and stuff them in my pockets. When I have enough, I have a book."
"This book [March], in my estimation, is a road map. It is a change agent. It is saying to people, "This is a way"."
"In my opinion, understanding who your target audience is, and what they want, and writing to them (and only them!) is the most important component of being successful as an author."
"Great nations write their autobiographies in three manuscripts - the book of their deeds, the book of their words and the book of their art."
"A book worth reading is worth buying."
"Books, the children of the brain."
"If you don't write your books, nobody else will do it for you. No one else has lived your life."
"It is right for you, young men, to enrich yourselves with the spoils of all pure literature; but he who would make a favorite of a bad book, simply because it contains a few beautiful passages, might as well caress the hand of an assassin because of the jewelry which sparkles on his fingers."
"..books look as if they contain knowledge, while e-readers look as if they contain information."
"My writing is of a very different kind from anything I've heard about. All this mythological material is out there, a big gathering of stuff, and I have been reading it for some forty- or fifty-odd years. There are various ways of handling that. The most common is to put the material together and publish a scholarly book about it. But when I'm writing, I try to get a sense of an experiential relationship to the material. In fact, I can't write unless that happens ... I don't write unless the stuff is really working on me, and my selection of material depends on what works."
"There's almost always a point in a book where something happens that triggers the rest of the plot."
