Book Quotes - Page 155

Sometimes when I think how good my book can be, I can hardly breathe.

You don't write a book to show off.

You never know what's going to happen. My mother was an English teacher. If someone had told her that I was going to write a book, she would never have believed that. So you can never say never.

Life was like a box of chocolates. You never know what you're gonna get.

Literature is a place for generosity and affection and hunger for equals - not a prizefight ring. We are increased, confirmed in our medium, roused to do our best, by every good writer, every fine achievement. Would we want one good writer or fine book less? The sense of writers being pitted against each other is bred primarily by the workings of the commercial marketplace, and by critics lauding one writer at the expense of another while ignoring the existence of nearly all.

Day after day I read Freud, thinking myself to be very enlightened and scientific when, as a matter of fact, I was about as scientific as an old woman secretly poring over books about occultism, trying to tell her own fortune, and learning how to dope out the future form the lines in the palm of her hand. I don't know if I ever got very close to needing a padded cell: but if I ever had gone crazy, I think psychoanalysis would have been the one thing chiefly responsible for it.

I cannot live without books.

In the world of letters, learning and knowledge are one, and books are the source of both; whereas in science, as in life, learning and knowledge are distinct, and the study of things, and not of books, is the source of the latter.

Hannibal Lecter: We live in a primitive time - don't we, Will? - neither savage nor wise. Half measures are the curse of it. Any rational society would either kill me or give me my books.

A book that is shut is but a block.

May blessings be upon the head of Cadmus, the Phoenicians, or whoever it was that invented books.

I was reading the poems of Rochester. Rochester made himself out to be bisexual, but I think that was only to shock. Most of his poetry is sexual, even pornographic.

Not in this specific form. But all great cities are inhabited by ghosts. A book of this kind could probably be written about Jakarta, Manila, or London by anyone who had a feeling for the invisible truths of those places.

This evening, I sat by an open window and read till the light was gone and the book was no more than a part of the darkness.

Religious fundamentalists in Bangladesh have always argued for a ban on my books.

And they write innumerable books; being too vain and distracted for silence: seeking every one after his own elevation, and dodging his emptiness.

My library is an archive of longings.

That afternoon he told me that the difference between human beings and animals was that human beings were able to dream while awake. He said the purpose of books was to permit us to exercise that faculty. Art, he said, was a controlled madness… He said books weren't made of themes, which you could write essays about, but of images that inserted themselves into your brain and replaced what you were seeing with your eyes.

However you look at it, in these books "power" tends to be an expression of the essential nature of the person or being whose power it is. On those occasions when we've seen Lord Foul act directly, he seems to exert the withering force of pure scorn. IMHO, that's pretty intense.

The first draft of a book—even a long one—should take no more than three months, the length of a season.

I've always had great respect for Paddington because he is amusingly English and eccentric. He is a great British institution and my generation grew up with the books and then Michael Horden's animations.

If you do a little bit of looking at books with your children and inspire them to be curious about the pictures and ... what the word means, but don't get into very structured systematic teaching at too early an age, and you also interact emotionally and have fun with pretend play ... then you have the best of both worlds.

The world has always been like a comic book world to me! What's happened is that communications got better and better, so now with cell-phones we can be in touch with people half a globe away.

There are many people who reach their conclusions about life like schoolboys: they cheat their master by copying the answer out of a book without having worked the sum out for themselves.

For me, a holiday is about taking a book and going to a mountain and reading.