Book Blogs Quotes

I'm reading a book, because I'm brainy. No, it is a book - if you don't know, it is like a blog except bigger. ~ Craig Ferguson

It's through traveling you make the great journey into yourself, and it's the clarity of extremes in traveling that forces you to meet yourself like you've never met yourself before. ~ Carew Papritz

She was transcribing names and phone numbers from an old book to a new one. There were no addresses. Her friends had phone numbers only, a race of people with a seven-bit analog consciousness. ~ Don DeLillo

The only complete reading is that which transforms the book into a simultaneous network of reciprocal relations. ~ Jean Rousset

Our books still do not require batteries. But I am no fool. It is a slender advantage. ~ Robin Sloan

A prose writer never sees a reader walk out of a book; for a playwright, it's another matter. An audience is an invaluable education. In my experience, theatre artists don't know what they've made until they've made it. ~ John Lahr

My first book really did change my life. It allowed me to fully express myself. There was a sense that I was worth something as an artist. ~ Gary Shteyngart

I immediately went out and bought a book on anger management. And now I have that book, and I don't know if I'll get to the book. But I'm certainly excited about the day where I can't find the book, and I get to say, 'Where the hell is my anger management book?!' ~ Marc Maron

But the way girls roam over the earth now is something terrible. It always makes me think of Satan in the Book of Job, going to and fro and walking up and down. ~ L.M. Montgomery

When I was in college, I used to write little ditties and short stories and poetry for my friends. Writing a book is another thing. It is so much different from my traditional day of dirty fingernails and greasy hair and hot pans. ~ Mario Batali

The ultimate authority of my life is not the Bible; it is not confined between the covers of a book. It is not something written by men and frozen in time. It is not from a source outside myself. My ultimate authority is the divine voice in my own soul. Period. ~ Sue Monk Kidd

What's so funny?" he asked.
"You'll just think I'm silly."
"I already think you're silly, so you might as well tell me."
"Batman," she breathed.
"What? ~ Elena Kincaid

Radio did not kill books and television did not kill radio or movies - what television did kill was cinema newsreel. TV does it much better because it can deliver it instantly. Who wants last week's news? ~ Douglas Adams

[M]y first published book had just appeared in stores. The last year of my life
the year of finishing it, editing it, and seeing it through its various page-proof passes
ranks among the most unnerving of my young life. It has not felt good, or freeing. It has felt nerve-shreddingly disquieting. Publication simply allows one that much more to worry about. This cannot be said to aspiring writers often or sternly enough. Whatever they carry within themselves they believe publication cures will not, I can all but guarantee, be cured. You just wind up with new diseases. ~ Tom Bissell

For me, the camera is a sketch book, an instrument of intuition and spontaneity. ~ Henri Cartier-Bresson

I will try to write books until I drop dead. ~ Cornelia Funke

If after I die, people want to write my biography, there is nothing simpler. They only need two dates: the date of my birth and the date of my death. Between one and another, every day is mine. ~ Fernando Pessoa

The man who publishes a book without an index ought to be damned 10 miles beyond hell, where the Devil himself cannot get for stinging nettles. ~ John Baynes

I fear that I can no longer travel without technology. Twenty years ago, I loved getting on a bus in West Africa and taking off for a city I'd never been to before, relying on advice from out-of-date travel books and fellow passengers on the bus. Now, I end up using TripAdvisor, Yelp, and Google Maps. I probably eat and sleep better when I'm on the road, but I miss the mystery of travel when it was more random and unpredictable. ~ Ethan Zuckerman

Evan Handler is not only a fine actor, he's a damn good writer. It's Only Temporary is wise and funny and as righteously indignant as it is endearingly self-effacing. In what may be a literary first, the book actually left me wanting more. ~ Meghan Daum

Write," he said.
"I'll write to you as soon as I get there," answered Julian.
"No. Not to me. Write books. Not letters. Write them for me, for Penelope. ~ Carlos Ruiz Zafon

Keep a diary, but don't just list all the things you did during the day. Pick one incident and write it up as a brief vignette. Give it color, include quotes and dialogue, shape it like a story with a beginning, middle and end - as if it were a short story or an episode in a novel. It's great practice. Do this while figuring out what you want to write a book about. The book may even emerge from within this running diary. ~ John Berendt

And now, talking of praying, I realise sadly that there will be little point in praying for you. You are passing now to a region where you will be beyond the reach of the power of prayer. ~ Anthony Burgess

The mind that constantly wanders through the past is always a terrible mess. ~ Marwane Caber

Only the sixth sense can expose what the other five have hidden. ~ Matthew A. Petti

You must take a year off, one of these days, before you're old and tired and weighed down by responsibility. Go away somewhere, and read. Read all the important books. Educate yourself, then you'll see the world in a different way. ~ Helon Habila

The fact that the commercial success of my books has allowed me to buy a house for myself and my daughter I think is a lovely thing. I don't think there is anything wrong with that. ~ Marianne Williamson

I love getting fan mail. Often, as a writer, you never know what your readers think of a book ... you get critical reviews and sales figures, but none of that is the same as knowing you've made a person stay up all night reading, or helped them have a good cry, or really touched their life. ~ Jodi Picoult

I'm essentially a humorist and, I think, a pretty good one. I've known all along that 'My Friend Dahmer' is the one book I'll be most known for, and in a way, that's a drag, as it's nothing like the rest of the work I've done or will do moving forward. But the way I figure, it's better to have a best-known work than not to have one at all. ~ Derf

Anyone who has no need of anybody but himself is either a beast or a God.
Aristotle ~ Bruce Wayne Sullivan

The only bad book was a book that didn't have any pages in it. ~ Chelsea M. Cameron

I suddenly thought about my old girlfriend, the one I had first slept with in my third year of high school. Chills ran through me as I realized how badly I had treated her. I had hardly ever thought about her thoughts or feelings or the pain I had caused her. She was such a sweet and gentle thing, but at the time I had taken her sweetness for granted and later hardly gave her a second thought. What was she doing now? I wondered. And had she forgiven me? ~ Haruki Murakami

He would go somewhere no one knew him, and he would sit in a library all day and read books and listen to people breathing. ~ Neil Gaiman

Books are to be call'd for, and supplied, on the assumption that the process of reading is nor a half-sleep, but, in highest sense, an exercise, a gymnast's struggle; that the reader is to do something for himself, must be on the alert, must himself or herself construct indeed the poem, argument, history, metaphysical essay - the text furnishing the hints, the clue, the start or frame-work. Not the book needs so much to be the complete thing, but the reader of the book does. That were to make a nation of supple and athletic minds well-train'd, intuitive, used to depend on themselves, not on a few coteries of writers. ~ Walt Whitman

While it is in no way racist for any author to write a book exclusively about white women, it is fundamentally racist for books to be published that focus solely on the American white woman's experience in which that experience is assumed to be the American woman's experience. ~ Bell Hooks

Each new day is another chapter in the unfolding promise of deliverance and life. ~ Elizabeth George

Except when Yankees are around," Moss said. "Then they'll swear up and down that they didn't know what was going on. Some prick will probably write a book that shows how they didn't really massacre their Negroes after all." "Oh, yeah? Then where'd the smokes go?" Goodman asked. "I mean, they were there before the war, and then they weren't. So what happened?" "Well, we killed a bunch of 'em when we bombed Confederate cities." Moss was a well-trained attorney; he could spin out an argument whether he believed in it or not. "Some died in the rebellion. Some went up to the USA. Some died of hunger and disease - there was a war on, you know. But a massacre? Nah. Never happened." Barry Goodman's mouth twisted. "That's disgusting. That'd gag a maggot, damned if it wouldn't." "Bet your ass," Moss said. "You think it won't happen, though? Give it twenty years - thirty at the outside." "Disgusting, ~ Harry Turtledove

A good book is a man's best friend. It never leaves you even in your darkest hour. ~ Sophany Thay

Animal Farm is not a book about how pigs - animals - when bestowed with power start to behave like men. It is a book about how men, when given power over other men, start to behave like pigs. ~ George Orwell

If I'm in a state about a book, I'll get up at 6 A.M. and write before breakfast, but usually I'll start afterwards and then work a full day with a break for lunch. ~ Claire Tomalin

Genius is not enough, it takes Courage to change people's hearts. ~ Green Book

Few of us make any serious effort to remember what we read. When I read a book, what do I hope will stay with me a year later? If it's a work of nonfiction, the thesis, maybe, if the book has one. A few savory details, perhaps. If it's fiction, the broadest outline of the plot, something about the main characters (at least their names), and an overall critical judgment about the book. Even these are likely to fade. Looking up at my shelves, at the books that have drained so many of my waking hours, is always a dispiriting experience. One Hundred Years of Solitude: I remember magical realism and that I enjoyed it. But that's about it. I don't even recall when I read it. About Wuthering Heights I remember exactly two things: that I read it in a high school English class and that there was a character named Heathcliff. I couldn't say whether I liked the book or not. ~ Joshua Foer