Book Quotes - Page 131

Life is like a book son. And every book has an end. No matter how much you like that book you will get to the last page and it will end. No book is complete without its end. And once you get there, only when you read the last words, will you see how good the book is.

Anyone who is too lazy to master the comparatively small glossary necessary to understand Chaucer deserves to be shut out from the reading of good books forever.

No man understands a deep book until he has seen and lived at least part of its contents.

I hope never to retire. I write so many because it's the thing I like to do most - to write. And if you write every day, you just naturally get a lot of books.

All good books are alike in that they are truer than if they really happened and after you are finished reading one you feel that it all happened to you and after which it all belongs to you.

Look, Mrs. McGillicuddy, it's not my fault your son jumped out a dorm room window on Christmas eve. I've written over fifty books as a Columbia professor, all right? You don't do that by holding hands with every at-risk undergraduate who says he's homesick, or he's turning gay, or the dog ate his term paper. I write about Lincoln, and freedom, and great ideas. I don't always have time for students. It's like Dean Martin used to say: if you want to talk, go to a priest. Hey -- what's the gun for?

George W. Bush was passionate about AIDS. And we had a 10-minute talk at the interval of a concert at the Kennedy Center about AIDS. And I was astonished about how well-informed he was and his commitment to AIDS. And so it's the typical thing of don't judge a book by its cover until you have read the book.

There is a reason they call God a presence - because God is right here, right now. In the present is the only place to find Him, and now is the only time.

Certain books come to meet me, as do people.

As a girl - twelve, thirteen years old - I was absolutely certain that a good book had to have a man as its hero, and that depressed me.

Books are those faithful mirrors that reflect to our mind the minds of sages and heroes.

Fill your house with stacks of books, in all the crannies and all the nooks.

I first met the subject of X-ray diffraction of crystals in the pages of the book W. H. Bragg wrote for school children in 1925, Concerning the Nature of Things.

People are just cannibals unless they leave each other alone.

I'd always rather stand or fall on my own mistakes. There's nothing worse than looking back, in a published book, at a line edit or a copy edit that you felt queasy about and didn't want to take, but took anyway.

The future? Like unwritten books and unborn children, you don't talk about it.

I definitely wasn’t cool in high school. I really wasn’t. I did belong to many of the clubs and was in leadership on yearbook and did the musical theater route, so I had friends in all areas, but I certainly did not know what to wear, did not know how to do my hair, all those things.

Children's books are often seen as the poor relation of literature. But children are just as demanding as adult readers, if not more so. I should know. I'm a children's writer myself.

For the best part of my childhood I visited the local library three or four times a week, hunching in the stacks on a foam rubber stool and devouring children's fiction, classics, salacious thrillers, horror and sci-fi, books about cinema and origami and natural history, to the point where my parents encouraged me to read a little less.

As much as I like it when a book I'm writing speeds along, the downside can be that an author becomes too eager to finish and rushes the end. The end is even more important than the first page, and rushing can damage it.

Every book is a new journey. I never felt I was an expert on a subject as I embarked on a project.

I think myself that, rather like books, music is meant to enter into the brain, well via your ears rather than your eyes but, it's - I think a lot more should be left to the imagination.

They say there is no 'free lunch' in life. But there are free books! I still can't believe I can go to my local library and get just abut any book in the world - and I don't have to pay a dime!! It's amazing! The library is truly the greatest invention of our civilization.

We're actually trying to develop an iPhone app, now that the Droid is out, we'll do it for that as well, if we ever learn how to program on this thing. But the idea is that to make money concrete. So, you can do this app, and it's not out there, but you can do the app. And you say, "I like vacation in the Bahamas, shoes, lattes, and books." And now, when you are tempted to buy something, that thing translates in terms of the things you are interested in.

I would like [the working man] to give me back books and newspapers and theories. And I would like to give him back, in return, his old insouciance, and rich, original spontaneity and fullness of life.