Book Quotes - Page 157

Man Thinking must not be subdued by his instruments. Books are for the scholar's idle times. When he can read God directly, the hour is too precious to be wasted in other men's transcripts of their readings.

Books are immortal sons deifying their sires.

Don't consider me too demanding if I ask you once again to set great store by holy books and read them as much as you can. This spiritual reading is as necessary to you as the air you breathe.

I like spaghetti because you don't have to take your eyes off the book to pick about among it, it's all the same.

And books that were published in much larger numbers than Selfish, Little are hard to find. And publishers who wanted to publish my last few works have them stuck in limbo while new distribution ideas and legal issues and fears are blown away.

We have more freedom of the press than any other country in a similar position. Even way back in the frightened '50s, Communists, for example, could publish their magazine. The KKK published their own books. But face it, the mass media is controlled by money.

Everything on Earth is being continuously transformed.

I've always been a very restless person. I work hard, spend too much time looking after my son, I dance like a mad thing, I learned calligraphy. I go to courses on selling, I read one book after another. But that's all a way of avoiding those moments when nothing is happening, because those blank spaces give me a feeling of absolute emptiness, in which not a single crumb of love exists.

Books are a poor substitute for female companionship, but they are easier to find.

They said I ignored the drug problem. Well, I gave speeches on drugs, I wrote books on drugs. I did darn near everything on drugs!

Books of quotations ... afford me one of the most undemanding but satisfying forms of reading pleasure.

I've given up reading books. I find it takes my mind off myself.

A lot of people consider my books to be straightforward, but I think that I write from atmosphere to atmosphere rather than from event to event.

I don't like Communism because it hands out wealth through rationing books.

The best of a book is not the thought which it contains, but the thought which it suggests; just as the charm of music dwells not in the tones but in the echoes of our hearts.

The person who wins the Nobel Prize is not the person who read the most journal articles and took the most notes on them. It's the person who knew what to look for. And cultivating that capacity to seek what's significant, always willing to question whether you're on the right track - that's what education is going to be about, whether it's using computers and the Internet, or pencil and paper, or books.

What a joy it is to read a book that shocks one into remembering just how high one's literary standards should be.... a tour de force by one of England's best novelists.... Atonement is a spectacular book; as good a novel - and more satisfying... - than anything McEwan has written....sublimely written narrative.... The Dunkirk passage is a stupendous piece of writing, a set piece that could easily stand on its own.

The more sins you confess, the more books you will sell.

The Tibetan Book of Living and Dying says that death is the graduation ceremony, while living is just a long course in learning and preparing for the next journey. If we acknowledge death as the beginning, then how can we fear it?

I have always been accused of taking the things I love – football, of course, but also books and records – much too seriously, and I do feel a kind of anger when I hear a bad record, or when someone is lukewarm about a book that means a lot to me. Perhaps it was these desperate, bitter men in the West Stand at Arsenal who taught me how to get angry in this way; and perhaps it is why I earn some of my living as a critic – maybe it’s those voices I can hear when I write. ‘You’re a WANKER, X.’ ‘The Booker Prize? THE BOOKER PRIZE? They should give that to me for having to read you.

“A living poem” had always been the words that came to mind when he tried to describe her to others.

Sometimes we need to be apart to understand just how much we truly love each other .

To literary critics a book is assumed to be guilty until it proves itself innocent.

It always felt like the price of being a writer was that you would - even in the most terrible moments, there was a little phantom version of you sitting on your shoulder with a notebook going, I can use this. OK, look at the way that the light is glinting off the broken plastic on the road next to the blood. You can use this. And it was always a very strange feeling.

A book is a dream that you hold in your hands.