Book Quotes - Page 42

When we are collecting books, we are collecting happiness.

It often happens that the quotations constitute the most valuable part of a book.

I didn't get that power from gunz..coz there's no gunz in jail..I got that power from books and from thinking and strategizing...... That's what I want little niggaz to see.

Obscenity is not a quality inherent in a book or picture, but is solely and exclusively a contribution of the reading mind, and hence cannot be defined in terms of the qualities of a book or picture.

Reading, because we control it, is adaptable to our needs and rhythms. We are free to indulge our subjective associative impulse; the term I coin for this is deep reading: the slow and meditative possession of a book. We don't just read the words, we dream our lives in their vicinity. The printed page becomes a kind of wrought-iron fence we crawl through, returning, once we have wandered, to the very place we started.

Not write what you know, but know what you write. If you write about a world before, after, or other than this one, enter that world completely. Search it to find your deepest longings and most terrible fears. Let imagination carry you as far as it may, as long as you recount the voyage with excitement and wonder. But this is the most important rule: write the book you most long to read.

I was carried away, swept along by the mighty stream of words pouring from the hundreds of pages. To me it was the ultimate book: once you had read it, neither your own life nor the world you lived in would ever look the same.

Books aren't lumps of paper, but minds on shelves.

The fourth rule is: "Make the enemy live up to their own book of rules." You can kill them with this, for they can no more obey their own rules than the Christian church can live up to Christianity.

Explaining the moment of connection between a reader and book to someone who's never experienced it is like trying to describe sex to a virgin.

Books are medicine and you have to take the right medicine that you need at that moment or that day or that time in your life.

I have never met an author who was sorry he or she wrote a book. They are only sorry they did not write it sooner.

Bookshops are infested with ideas. Books are quivering, murmuring creatures.

When you write your first novel you don't really know what you're doing. There may be writers out there who are brilliant, incisive and in control from their first 'Once upon a time'. I'm not one of them. Every once upon a time for me is another experience of white-water rafting in a leaky inner tube. And I have this theory that while the Story Council has its faults, it does have some idea that if books are going to get written, authors have to be able to write them.

A first book has some of the sweetness of a first love.

Libraries are my passion in life. Before I became mayor (of Los Angeles), I used to sneak out here during lunchtime...and I'd go to a corner and take a book-any book almost-and read it for a while, and then feel rejuvenated.

Write what you care about and understand. Writers should never try to outguess the marketplace in search of a salable idea; the simple truth is that all good books will eventually find a publisher if the writer tries hard enough, and a central secret to writing a good book is to write on that people like you will enjoy.

Great fashion is all about surprise. It should always be about doing something that isn't by the book.

Many good sayings are to be found in holy books, but merely reading them will not make one religious.

But this is exactly why I read--and don't belong to a book group--because reading is the most individual thing there is. Why collectivize it? Didn't we have enough bad English teachers in school? Crowd sourcing and literature shouldn't mix.

I breathed the book before I saw it; tasted the book before I read it.

The most technologically efficient machine that man has ever invented is the book.

I carry a notebook full of sketches of pictures I want to take - they are really scruffy sketches, but at least I am going out there with a clear objective.

The difference between a novelist and someone who tinkers around with writing is this: novelists finish their books.

No theory, no ready-made system, no book that has ever been written will save the world. I cleave to no system. I am a true seeker.