Book Ideas Quotes

Books can create a depth of story, a background of information and ideas, that televison and movies can't. Sure, the television shows may shock, but only on a superficial level. They'd never risk market share to really explore the issues. They report, but don't analyze or suggest any new ways for living our lives. ~ Chuck Palahniuk

The strange and wonderful Book of Job treats of the same subject as we are discussing; its contents are a fiction, conceived for the purpose of explaining the different opinions which people hold on Divine Providence ... This fiction, however, is in so far different from other fictions that it includes profound ideas and great mysteries, removes great doubts, and reveals the most important truths. I will discuss it as fully as possible; and I will also tell you the words of our Sages that suggested to me the explanation of this great poem. ~ Maimonides

Rest, nature, books, music ... such is my idea of happiness. ~ Leo Tolstoy

The ideas get under your skin. I am honored and deeply excited by the thought that the next generation of writers, or whomever, are influenced by these books. ~ Robert Greene

Directing is a reactionary job more than a creation job. The job is to react whether it's moment one, the first time you read the script or see an article or read a book or notice something happen on the street and have an idea for a movie, and it just continues from there on in. You're just reacting to dialogue, a performance, an audition, a headache, a piece of furniture, a piece of clothing. ~ Jason Reitman

All who have read a few old books have picked up the old tactics of considering every new idea a 'heresy' which must be rooted out. ~ Lu Xun

I've always dabbled. I've always nearly written a book, I've always tried painting, I've always tried to make something out of ideas, really. It was never a plan. I never thought, Right. First I'll get famous, and then I'll do a book. ~ Ricky Gervais

I actually didn't mind too much that Gabriel had spent the past four nights in my room. He was relatively quiet, didn't go through my things, and liked to listen to my weird book ideas late at night. When I told him that I wanted to write a book about zombies taking over our town, he suggested that I make myself the hero and said nonchalantly, "You could even have to kill me after I get bitten. Wouldn't that be an awesome twist?" I didn't tell him then but I had no intention of ever letting him die in any book. ~ John Corey Whaley

I love the idea of books being more than books, or being, rather, something other than books. ~ Jonathan Safran Foer

When the mind is full of any one subject, that subject seems to recur with extraordinary frequency - it appears to pursue or to meet us at every turn: in every conversation that we hear in every book we open, in every newspaper we take up, the reigning idea recurs; and then we are surprised, and exclaim at these wonderful coincidences. ~ Maria Edgeworth

So much for the right books; the right use of them is another matter. The children must enjoy the book. The ideas it holds must each make that sudden, delightful impact upon their minds, must cause that intellectual stir, which mark the inception of an idea. ~ Charlotte Mason

A great book begins with an idea; a great life, with a determination. ~ Louis L'Amour

The world of conceptualized ideas is quite wonderful, even when it's - like Aristotle's Physics - an outmoded book. The physics is not true. But the reasoning is dazzling. ~ William H Gass

In my books, my idea is always to explore social context and social forces. ~ Alix Kates Shulman

The idea that comics stores, distributors and publishers simply 'give the customers what they want' is nonsense. What the customers wanted they didn't get - and they left. ~ Scott McCloud

Bookshops are infested with ideas. Books are quivering, murmuring creatures. ~ Rodrigo Rey Rosa

Building an Effective Women's Ministry is a brand new book from Harvest House Publishers. Sharon Jaynes, vice president of Proverbs 31 Ministries, is the author. This book has planning helps for beginning and maintaining your women's ministries plus ideas for programs and special events. You know which section I turned to first, don't you? That's right. The idea section. Sharon has some good ideas. Great cover and helpful contents!!! ~ Brenda Poinsett

The problem with books, now that I've written one, is that the idea of adaptation is so much easier than sitting down to write something new. ~ Nick Cave

A lot of people have said to me, 'That's a great idea, running for president. You'll get booked for more speeches. You can write a book.' ~ John Bolton

The idea of being productive, the idea of producing many books is going to lead you toward you becoming a better and better writer. ~ Walter Mosley

I do recall how I got the ideas for some of my books. Many of them are a result of doodling. ~ Bill Peet

A lot of my ideas come from McNally Jackson bookstore. One of my favorite things to do is just go there and look through architecture books and interior design books. Something about the aesthetics of space and beautiful images works with my brain. ~ St. Lucia

Normally, what you're envious of is a book, not a writer: standards, ideas, levels ... almost nonexistent things. ~ James Salter

When soured by disappointment we must endeavor to pursue some fixed and pleasing course of study, that there may be no blank leaf in our book of life. Painful and disagreeable ideas vanish from the mind that can fix its attention upon any subject. ~ Johann Georg Ritter Von Zimmermann

Normally book ideas come to me in a moment. ~ Tracy Chevalier

I read a lot of science books - I love cosmology, quantum theory, particle physics. So my idea of a great read would probably put you directly into a coma. ~ Augusten Burroughs

In Marseilles they make half the toilet soap we consume in America, but the Marseillaise only have a vague theoretical idea of its use, which they have obtained from books of travel. ~ Mark Twain

Whether it's from the books or the films, there are some people that will have a very fixed idea in their head. You're not going to match that. At a certain point, you have to accept that. ~ Hugh Dancy

Always, with any movie that I do, I have a book of ideas that I've heard, or seen, or whatever, and I always try to incorporate it in the film. ~ Adrian Lyne

When I start any book, I have no idea what I'm going to do. ~ Jon Krakauer

Most authors have one idea per book. Shakespeare had two per sentence. ~ Lauren Hutton

The Hawk and the Dove is a wonderful idea for a book, wonderfully carried out. Nicholas Thompson has used illuminating new material to present each of his protagonists in a convincing, respectful, but unsparing way. Even more valuable, he has used the interactions and tensions between Paul Nitze and George Kennan to bring much of American 20th century foreign policy to life, with human richness ever present but with the big issues clear in all their complexity. ~ James Fallows

And then, unbidden, seemingly out of nowhere, a thought or image arrives. Some will float into your head like goldfish, lovely, bright, orange, and weightless, and you follow them like a child at an aquarium that was thought to be without fish. Others will step of the shadows like Boo Radley and make you catch your breath or take a step backward. They're often so rich, these unbidden thoughts, and so clear that they feel indelible. But I say write them all down anyway. ~ Anne Lamott

It started out as a typically insane idea to map every part of the published text in terms of its manuscript provenance and history, and to establish the cultural meaning of the book, part and whole. ~ Oliver Harris

Book ideas are like planes, lined up to approach the runway. Some never leave the gate, but others move quickly to the front of the line. It was like that with The Four Purposes. Honestly, I cannot remember the moment I had the idea for the book; perhaps because it emerged like a green shoot emerging from the soil of my subconscious. But it seemed important enough to begin the flow of words that eventually shaped themselves into this new book. ~ Dan Millman

It's just a weird idea to me because each book is a complete universe unto itself, so why would I want this other universe from this other galaxy that has nothing to do with mine? That's how I really feel about it. Let's be honest - I'm still the writer, so certain things will be common denominators. But that I just want to keep natural and not studied. ~ Chang-rae Lee

Fall is the season of beauty and delicious food. Be grateful for the change of scenery, and try observing it to get more book ideas. ~ B.A. Gabrielle

Since each child reads only about six hundred books in the course of childhood, each book should nourish them in some way - with new ideas, insight, humor, or vocabulary. ~ Joan Aiken

After me, the Revolution - or, rather the ideas which formed it - will resume their course. It will be like a book from which the marker is removed, and one starts to read again at the page where one left off. ~ Napoleon Bonaparte

Genealogy of ideas. You don't get to pick your family, but you can pick your teachers and you can pick your friends and you can pick the music you listen to and you can pick the books you read and you can pick the movies you see. ~ Austin Kleon

Music endures and ages far better than books. Books, made of words, are unavoidably attached to ideas, events, conflict, and history, but music has the power to transcend time. At least for a time. Palestrina sounds as fresh today as he did in 1555, but Dante, only three centuries older, already smells of the archaic, the medieval, the catacombs. ~ Edward Abbey

Science fiction is always a vehicle for ideas. It's the form which allows either movies or books to be an exploration of how we should live. ~ Salman Rushdie

I don't have any hobbies because my working job is my hobby. What I do is I spend my whole time looking through telescopes and having brain scans and buying books about various different ideas and I just sit around, that's my life. ~ Robin Ince

My son jokes with me that he thinks I Google the word 'sad' to come up with book ideas. ~ Patricia McCormick

Books ... were merely nodes in a near-infinite matrix of information that exists in four dimensions, evolving toward the idea of the concept of the approximation of the shadow of Truth vertically through time as well as longitudinally through knowledge. ~ Dan Simmons

I like the idea of a book being a democratic space which readers enter, carrying their own thoughts, and participate in a conversation, or experience of grace. ~ Aleksandar Hemon

There are people who are born superficial ... They prefer not to have to deal with more than a limited number of oversimplified ideas - they prefer the book reviews to the books, the headlines and the leading paragraph to the full report, the generalization to the facts, and the negative to the positive. ~ Gwethalyn Graham

I'm strictly a one-project-at-a-time kind of guy. If I came up with a compelling idea for a different book while working on a project, I'd probably abandon the first project and go with the new idea. ~ Neal Stephenson

At times there seems to be a million ideas worth painting. However, there are days when it's a challenge to pull any idea together. On these days I go to my studio, leaf through an art history book, and tell myself that I am part of this great tradition. ~ James Dean

In my book, The Sins of Scripture, I traced the development of tribal religion, which included ideas like God's killing the Egyptians because they hated the chosen people. Then a God of love finally appears in the Book of Hosea, about the 8th century. A God of justice appears in the Book of Amos in the late 8th century or early 7th century. ~ John Shelby Spong

Dreams are a good source for book ideas. ~ Mary Sage Nguyen

When I was working on 'Drown' - this was way back in the mid-'90s - I had this idea that I wanted to do another collected stories. I wanted to do another book like 'Drown' that focused specifically on infidelity. ~ Junot Diaz

If you invent two or three people and turn them loose in your manuscript, something is bound to happen to them
you can't help it; and then it will take you the rest of the book to get them out of the natural consequences of that occurrence, and so first thing you know, there's your book all finished up and never cost you an idea. ~ Mark Twain

Most people in politics draw energy from backslapping and shaking hands and all that. I draw energy from discussing ideas. ~ Al Gore

Good ideas don't stand a chance against good bureaucracy. ~ Hiroshi Sakurazaka

I wrote all four of my books at Starbucks. ~ Rainbow Rowell

Ultimately, innovation depends on the people with advanced skills who have the ideas, and on the business risk-takers willing to back them. ~ Anthony Pratt

I have had several offers to make the book into a film. I don't know if the message could be accurately transmitted, and so I have been somewhat hesitant in granting film rights. ~ Frederick Lenz

It is often too easy to explain a novel idea to a few enlightened persons with a few words. But to enlighten about the same to many people, too many words are often required ~ Anuj

The world is a book and those who do not travel read only one page. ~ Augustine Of Hippo

There's a mass of places, really, where the idea started. ~ Siobhan Davies

I'm interested in the Gothic novel because it's very much a woman's form. Why is there such a wide readership for books that essentially say, 'Your husband is trying to kill you'? ~ Margaret Atwood

What I hate about kitchen-sink dramas is [this idea] that the set is real, therefore you're going to be seeing truth. You have to earn truth. Truth can't be a part of the fact that people appear to talk that way and live in that room. You're looking for the poetry in something, and I don't mean poetry in the fancy sense. Naturalism believes by just replicating a thing you give the truth, rather than earning the truth. ~ John Guare

If you are having trouble making a chord, get a book, that is how I learned. There are guitar tuning apps so you can tune your guitar, and just learn how to play along with your records. And it's great to be able to play along with another musician. That is like trial by fire. ~ Joan Jett

I spent my life in the library reading books. ~ Michael Caine

For a woman to be able to dominate and also be feminine and soft, that's a talent. And its not all about appearance. A woman who has a brain, who is street-smart and book-smart, that woman is very, very sexy to me. ~ Usher

The only reason I would write a sequel is if I were struck by an idea that I felt to be equal to the original. Too many sequels diminish the original. ~ Dean Koontz

This is not a book for the wild-haired crazies your company keeps in a corner. It is a book for you, your boss, and your employees, because the best future available to us is a future where you contriubute your true self and your best work. Are you up for that? ~ Seth Godin

Nothing opens up the mind and the heart like books do, and so they have the power to change the whole world. That's why the are burning books, Ava. To stop us thinking, and feeling, and imagining ... ~ Kate Forsyth

Sensibility ... is a direct and particular reaction to the separate and individual nature of things. It begins and ends with the sensuous apprehension of colour, texture and formal relations; and if we strive to organize these elements, it is not with the idea of increasing the knowledge of the mind, but rather in order to intensify the pleasure of the senses. ~ Herbert Read

Every town, every book, is a way to say, look, there's a new way, a different way. Every book in a bookstore is a fresh beginning. Every book is the next iteration of a very old story. Every bookstore, therefore, is like a safe‑ deposit box for civilization. ~ Liam Callanan

Harmonious words render ordinary ideas acceptable; less ordinary, pleasant; novel and ingenious ones, delightful. As pictures and statues, and living beauty, too, show better by music-light, so is poetry irradiated, vivified, glorified', and raised into immortal life by harmony. ~ Walter Savage Landor

Much depends upon when and where you read a book. In the five or six impatient minutes before the dinner is quite ready, who would think of taking up the Faerie Queen for a stopgap, or a volume of Bishop Andrews's Sermons? ~ Charles Lamb

The world needs opportunities for new leaders and new ideas. Kids need opportunities to lead and succeed. Are you ready to make the match? Because the world's problems shouldn't be the human family's heirloom. ~ Adora Svitak

Spoiler: I didn't win the Main Event. You had suspicions, you say? For one thing, the subtitle of this book would be "The Amazing Life-Affirming Story of an Unremarkable Jerk Who Won the World Series of Poker!" instead of having the word "Death" in it. For another, do these sound like the words of a motherfucker who won a million goddamn dollars? ~ Colson Whitehead

I feel like this whole idea of wanting something that you don't really have is also very American in a way. ~ Freida Pinto

Now Kate is a senior member of the royal family and on the brink of motherhood, it is time to look at the woman behind the name. She is the first person for 350 years without aristocratic blood to marry an heir to the throne, and if it wasn't for tragedy on both sides of her family, she would probably not be in the position she is today. However, circumstances before she was born and the support her parents gave her only got her so far - the rest has been up to her.
Although she was christened Catherine, she started to be called Kate at university and Kate is what William calls her. It became how she was referred to in the press, and therefore how she is known all around the world, and so that is how she will be referred to in this book. One day she will be Queen Catherine, but for now, she is known and loved as Kate. ~ Marcia Moody

Notes on Names, Transliterations and Titles This book inevitably contains a challenging diversity of names, languages and questions of transliteration. It is for general readers, so my policy is to use the most accessible and familiar names. I apologize to purists who are offended by these decisions. ~ Simon Sebag Montefiore

It would be worthy of the age to print together the collected Scriptures or Sacred Writings of the several nations, the Chinese, the Hindoos, the Persians, the Hebrews, and others, as the Scripture of mankind. The New Testament is still, perhaps, too much on the lips and in the hearts of men to be called a Scripture in this sense. Such a juxtaposition and comparison might help to liberalize the faith of men ... This would be the Bible, or Book of Books, which let the missionaries carry to the uttermost parts of the earth. ~ Henry David Thoreau

It's not as if I'm trying to write crossword puzzles to which one might find an answer at the back of the book or anything like that. ~ Paul Muldoon

From Lee's extensive quotes of Edwards on page 152 we can gather that the reason some reject good thoughts that might order their minds aright is because of a disposition of the heart, or a "taste" for evil. The habit of a person's mind is in accordance with his spiritual appetite, a good man's mind will always suggest and supply good and holy thoughts to connect ideas and information to create a beautiful picture in one's mind of God's orderly universe (Himself at the helm) but the evil man's mind is habitually disorganizing the things of this world or rather dis-integrating them from the knowledge of God, and so Edwards might say that his mind is not a cosmos but a chaos, or a conductor-less cacophony rather than a grand symphony. ~ Erick John Blore

I consciously try not to play favorites with my characters or my books. ~ Tina St. John

We aren't anything in particular. There is no self. There are only ideas and states of mind. ~ Frederick Lenz

Along with romantic love, she was introduced to another–physical beauty. Probably the most destructive ideas in the history of thought. Both originated in envy, thrived in insecurity, and ended in disillusion. In equating physical beauty with virtue, she stripped her mind, bound it, and collected self-contempt by the heap. She forgot lust and simple caring for. She regarded love as possessive mating, and romance as the goal of the spirit. It would be for her a well-spring from which she would draw the most destructive emotions, deceiving the lover, and seeking to imprison the beloved, curtailing freedom in every way. ~ Toni Morrison

If hundreds of thousands of people reach out for a book whose very title promises to deal with the question of a meaning to life, it must be a question that burns under their fingernails. ~ Viktor E. Frankl

The Hindu faith and the information for its sacred books, the Vedas, were taken to the Indian subcontinent by the Aryans from the Caucasus Mountains, one of the centers for extraterrestrials/inner terrestrials and their offspring. ~ David Icke

Somebody who sticks to his guns can be called a stubborn person or a principled person, it depends on whether you like his ideas or not. You can call somebody whose ideas you don't like an ideologist or a person of ideas. You can call somebody whose actions you don't like a pragmatist if you like them, or an opportunist if you don't. ~ Richard Pipes