Book Quotes - Page 75

The first sentence of a book is a handshake, perhaps an embrace.

I have said, and I repeat, at the risk of appearing sacrilegious, that the gas chambers are a detail of the history of the Second World War... If you take a book of a thousand pages on the Second World War, in which 50 million people died, the concentration camps occupy two pages and the gas chambers ten or 15 lines, and that's what's called a detail.

I love to travel, but when I really want to escape, I read a book.

I was given a dictionary when I was seven, and I read it because I had nothing else to read. I read it the way you read a book.

Love of books is the best of all.

I cordially dislike allegory in all its manifestations, and always have done since I grew old and wary enough to detect its presence.

There are no faster or firmer friendships than those formed between people who love the same books.

In researching this volume, I interviewed veterans who had been at the front during World War II. I read countless books, examined film footage, and listened to many detailed and intense stories firsthand, but the one comment that affected me the most came from a former soldier who lowered his gaze to the tabletop and said, ‘I never watch war movies.

Writing is the hardest work in the world. I have been a bricklayer and a truck driver, and I tell you – as if you haven't been told a million times already – that writing is harder. Lonelier. And nobler and more enriching.

There are several books out on punk history, but I haven't read any of them. I was there.

The dog always dies. Go to the library and pick out a book with an award sticker and a dog on the cover. Trust me, that dog is going down.

I drink to make other people interesting.

I suspect it may be like the difference between a drinker and an alcoholic; the one merely reads books, the other needs books to make it through the day.

Look at lots of exhibitions and books, and don't get hung up on cameras and technical things. Photography is about images.

Keeping books on social aid is capitalistic nonsense. I just use the money for the poor. I can't stop to count it.

The men in this book are fictitious characters but their counterparts can be found in cockpits all over the world. Now they are flying a war. Tomorrow they will be flying a peace, for, regardless of the world's condition, flying is their life.

My work in books, films and talks lies almost wholly with children, and I have very little time to give to grown-ups.

I love the idea of the teachings of Jesus Christ and the beautiful stories about it, which I loved in Sunday school and I collected all the little stickers and put them in my book. But the reality is that organised religion doesn't seem to work. It turns people into hateful lemmings and it's not really compassionate.

To write a book such as Tiger Bone & Rhino Horn is a formidable undertaking. You must accumulate thousands of facts and spare no detail, no matter how terrible. It is always easier to write a piece of fluff and leave everybody smiling. But then, the horrors of poaching would continue unchallenged?like as tent caterpillars consuming an apple orchard, our species mindlessly consumes the others of the earth. At present, the most significant hope for our planet may be knowledge, and Richard Ellis has done a heroic job in providing a large measure of that.

I look at [books] as a child looks at cakes - with glittering eyes and a watering mouth, imagining the pleasure that awaits him.

I don't remember when exactly I read my first comic book, but I do remember exactly how liberated and subversive I felt as a result.

You know we receive an education in the schools from books. All those books that people became educated from twenty-five years ago, are wrong now, and those that are good now, will be wrong again twenty-five years from now. So if they are wrong then, they are also wrong now, and the one who is educated from the wrong books is not educated, he is misled. All books that are written are wrong, the one who is not educated cannot write a book and the one who is educated, is really not educated but he is misled and the one who is misled cannot write a book which is correct.

Writers are not just people who sit down and write. They hazard themselves. Every time you compose a book your composition of yourself is at stake.

One of the best investors around, Joel Greenblatt, has written a popular, charming and funny book about investing in great companies at low P/E multiples. To simplify an already simple book, great companies are generally measured as companies that can generate lots of profit without requiring a lot of capital. This means that they have high ROEs.

Not all chemicals are bad. Without chemicals such as hydrogen and oxygen, for example, there would be no way to make water, a vital ingredient in beer.