Book Review Quotes

ABOUT SENTIMENTALITY IN LITERATURE:
"Sentimental fiction is a kind of pablum: Excessive amounts can spoil the appetite for reality, or at least for more fibrous forms of art. One reason, surely, why readers throw down books when they don't contain sufficiently "likable" characters is that their tolerance for any sort of moral challenge - for being asked, say, to sympathize with homeless little boys who are godless and truculent and a bit smelling - has been eroded by too many fairy tales masquerading as adult literature."~ wrote Zoe Heller for Bookends in the Sunday's NY Times Book Review interview ~ Alice Simpson

Among the things most characteristic of organisms--most distinctive of living as opposed to inorganic systems--is a sort of directedness. Their structures and activities have an adaptedness, an evident and vital usefulness to the organism. Darwin's answer and ours is to accept the common sense view...[that] the end ("telos") [is] that the individual and the species may survive. But this end is (usually) unconscious and impersonal. Naive teleology is controverted not by ignoring the obvious existence of such ends but by providing a naturalistic, materialistic explanation of the adaptive characteristics serving them. [Book review in "Science," 1959, p. 673.] ~ George Gaylord Simpson

One of the dumbest things you were ever taught was to write what you know. Because what you know is usually dull. Remember when you first wanted to be a writer? Eight or ten years old, reading about thin-lipped heroes flying over mysterious viny jungles toward untold wonders? That's what you wanted to write about, about what you didn't know. So. What mysterious time and place don't we know?
[Remember This: Write What You Don't Know (New York Times Book Review, December 31, 1989)] ~ Ken Kesey

Paper remains the standard to which digital media can only aspire. ~ Leah Price

"Hence," goes on the professor, "definitions of happiness are interesting." I suppose the best thing to do with that is to let is pass. Me, I never saw a definition of happiness that could detain me after train-time, but that may be a matter of lack of opportunity, of inattention, or of congenital rough luck. If definitions of happiness can keep Professor Phelps on his toes, that is little short of dandy. We might just as well get on along to the next statement, which goes like this: "One of the best" (we are still on definitions of happiness) "was given in my Senior year at college by Professor Timothy Dwight: 'The happiest person is the person who thinks the most interesting thoughts.'" Promptly one starts recalling such Happiness Boys as Nietzche, Socrates, de Maupassant, Jean-Jacques Rousseau, William Blake, and Poe."
-Review of the book, Happiness, by (Professor) William Lyon Phelps. Review title: The Professor Goes in for Sweetness and Light; November 5, 1927 ~ Dorothy Parker

It comes as no surprise to find [Norman] Mailer embracing [in the book On God] a form of Manicheanism, pitting the forces of light and darkness against each other in a permanent stand-off, with humanity as the battlefield. (When asked if Jesus is part of this battle, he responds rather loftily that he thinks it is a distinct possibility.) But it is at points like this that he talks as if all the late-night undergraduate talk sessions on the question of theism had become rolled into one. 'How can we not face up to the fact that if God is All-Powerful, He cannot be All-Good. Or She cannot be All-Good.'

Mailer says that questions such as this have bedevilled 'theologians', whereas it would be more accurate to say that such questions, posed by philosophers, have attempted to put theologians out of business. A long exchange on the probability of reincarnation (known to Mailer sometimes as "karmic reassignment") manages to fall slightly below the level of those undergraduate talk sessions. The Manichean stand-off leads Mailer, in closing, to speculate on what God might desire politically and to say: 'In different times, the heavens may have been partial to monarchy, to communism, and certainly the Lord was interested in democracy, in capitalism. (As was the Devil!)'

I think it was at this point that I decided I would rather remember Mailer as the author of Harlot's Ghost and The Armies of the Night. ~ Christopher Hitchens

Taking inspiration from her own experiences as a wife, mother, principal and teacher, Ellick creates a realistic and thought-provoking modern scenario for readers to ponder, based on a well-documented historic trend. ~ Bainbridge Island Review

I have begun in old age to understand just how oddly we all are put together. We are so proud of our autonomy that we seldom if ever realize how generous we are to ourselves, and just how stingy with others. One of the booby traps of freedom
which is bordered on all sides by isolation
is that we think so well of ourselves. I now see that I have helped myself to the best cuts at life's banquet. ~ Saul Bellow

Really good 'hard' novels - say, Wolf Hall - yield, if you read them carefully, the information you need when you need it, in order to follow their paths. But there is a point at which subtle storytelling maneuvers outmaneuver their own intelligibility. ~ Daniel Menaker

TOTALLY AMERICAN" personifies the dreams, inspiration, and ambition of the American people at a time we need it most. Reach deep in tribute to our founding Fathers, our Constitution, and our brave military forces. This is the fabric of America! ~ Stu Taylor

My husband and I are huge bibliophiles. He's always reading 'The New York Times Book Review' and then ordering 20 books online. ~ Carrie Coon

You see, the world is as big as an elephant or small as a grain of sand, depending on you. You can let it stomp you, gore you, swallow you up. Or you can let it slip into your shell and turn into a pearl." -- Benjamin East ~ Jonathan Freedman

Of the true mysteries of the universe . . . the one we may never solve is the mystery of other people. This is the underlying subject of all fiction--Who ARE you, and why are you different from me?--from a NYT Book Review review of Since We Fell, by Dennis Lehane ~ Noah Hawley

Book reviews have never helped me. Most of them erred in their interpretations and their work has been a waste of time. ~ Manuel Puig

If nobody talks about books, if they are not discussed or somehow contended with, literature ceases to be a conversation, ceases to be dynamic. Most of all, it ceases to be intimate. It degenerates into a monologue or a mutter. An unreviewed book is a struck bell that gives no resonance. Without reviews, literature would be oddly mute in spite of all those words on all those pages of all those books. Reviewing makes of reading a participant sport, not a spectator sport. ~ Patricia Hampl

Hitchcock's debut novel introduces 14-year-old Jessie Pearl, who endures more than her fair share of hardships, beginning with the death of her mother. Opening in 1922, the story follows the daily activities on the family's North Carolina tobacco farm. ...Hitchcock's story is gently and lovingly written, with elements drawn from her own family history. Its detailed honesty about the particular struggles of the period, especially for strong women (Maude, a no-nonsense midwife, is particularly memorable), is significant.
- PUBLISHERS WEEKLY ~ Publishers Weekly

The people who review my books, generally, are kind of youngish culture writers who aspire to write books, or write opinion pieces about what they think of Neil Young, or why they quit watching ER or whatever. And because of that, I think there's a lot of people who write about my books with the premise of, "Why this guy? Why not me?" ~ Chuck Klosterman

Of all reviews, the crushing review is the most popular, as being the most readable. ~ Anthony Trollope

So many Jonathans. A plague of literary Jonathans. If you read only the New York Times Book Review, you'd think it was the most common male name in America. Synonymous with talent, greatness. Ambition, vitality. ~ Jonathan Franzen

I swear, I have really tried to care about genres or categories, but I find myself sadly unable to do so. I will enjoy anything, anything, as long as it comes written in language that is personal to the point of idiosyncratic, euphonious, revealing and precise. I avoid any kind of writing that doesn't fill these requirements. I don't care which genre it belongs to. ~ Juan Gabriel Vasquez

You now can buy my book on amazon barnes & noble createspace and book review is to come for this book in 45 days ~ Todd Johnson

I'm interested in so many different things and I'd like to cover a lot of territory. I'm trying to see my show as the Sunday 'Times.' You have the Arts & Leisure section, you have the Op-Ed page, you have the Book Review ... even the Style section has those wonderful essays about relationships. ~ Joy Behar

Every so often, the gods stop laughing long enough to do something terrible. There are few facts that are not brutal. The bitter, insufficient truth is that God recovered, but fun is dead.
Alcohol: the antidote to civilization. Alcoholism is a fatal disease. But then I am not a member of Alcoholics Anonymous, because I don't want to be cured. Alcoholism is suicide with training wheels. I watch myself sinking, an inch at a time, and I spit into the eye of fate, like Doc Holliday, who died too weak to lift a playing card. My traitorous and degenerate attitude is sort of my book review of the world we live in. I resign from the human race. I declare myself null and void; folded, spindled, and mutilated.
. . .This bar is an oasis for the night people, the street people, the invisible tribe, the people who simply do not exist in the orderly world we see in Time - the weekly science fiction magazine published by the Pentagon - an orderly world which is a sanitized Emerald City populated by contented Munchkins who pay taxes to buy tanks, nerve gas, and bombers and not a world which is a bus-station toilet where the air is a chemical cocktail of cancer-causing agents, children are starving, and the daily agenda is kill or be killed.
When the world demands that you be larger than life, and you are finding it hard enough just being life-size, you can come here, in the messy hemorrhaging of reality, let your hair down, take your girdle off, and not be embarrassed by your ~ Gustav Hasford

How can so many (white, male) writers narratively justify restricting the agency of their female characters on the grounds of sexism = authenticity while simultaneously writing male characters with conveniently modern values?

The habit of authors writing Sexism Without Sexists in genre novels is seemingly pathological. Women are stuffed in the fridge under cover of "authenticity" by secondary characters and villains because too many authors flinch from the "authenticity" of sexist male protagonists. Which means the yardstick for "authenticity" in such novels almost always ends up being "how much do the women suffer", instead of - as might also be the case - "how sexist are the heroes".

And this bugs me; because if authors can stretch their imaginations far enough to envisage the presence of modern-minded men in the fake Middle Ages, then why can't they stretch them that little bit further to put in modern-minded women, or modern-minded social values? It strikes me as being extremely convenient that the one universally permitted exception to this species of "authenticity" is one that makes the male heroes look noble while still mandating that the women be downtrodden and in need of rescuing.

-Comment at Staffer's Book Review 4/18/2012 to "Michael J. Sullivan on Character Agency ~ Foz Meadows

Sometimes what-if fantasies are useful. Imagine that the entirety of Western civilisation's coding for computer systems or prints of all films ever made or all copies of Shakespeare and the Bible and the Qur'an were encrypted and held on one tablet device. And if that tablet was lost, stolen, burnt or corrupted, then our knowledge, use and understanding of that content, those words and ideas, would be gone for ever – only, perhaps, lingering in the minds of a very few men of memory whose job it had been to keep ideas alive. This little thought-experiment can help us to comprehend the totemic power of manuscripts. This is the great weight of responsibility for the past, the present and the future that the manuscripts of Constantinople carried. Much of our global cultural heritage – philosophies, dramas, epic poems – survive only because they were preserved in the city's libraries and scriptoria. Just as Alexandria and Pergamon too had amassed vast libraries, Constantinople understood that a physical accumulation of knowledge worked as a lode-stone – drawing in respect, talent and sheer awe. These texts contained both the possibilities and the fact of empire and had a quasi-magical status. This was a time when the written word was considered so potent – and so precious – that documents were thought to be objects with spiritual significance. (...)

It was in Constantinople that the book review was invented. Scholars seem to have had access to books within a proto-lendi ~ Bettany Hughes

With its superbly presented candor, News Junkie is very highly recommended reading both as a memoir offering unique insights into the mind and life of an investigative journalist, and as a"slice of life" window into the stories and personalities behind headline stories of corruption and crime. ~ Midwest Book Review

How I envy writers who can work on aeroplanes or in hotel rooms. On the run I can produce an article or a book review, or even a film script, but for fiction I must have my own desk, my own wall with my own postcards pinned to it, and my own window not to look out of. ~ John Banville

Most people don't have the money to spend on advertising to create awareness among readers, nor do they have the contacts at newspapers or magazines to get their books reviewed. ~ Sara Paretsky

I had a chance to read Monte Christo in prison once, too, but not to the end. I observed that while Dumas tries to create a feeling of horror, he portrays the Château d'If as a rather benevolent prison. Not to mention his missing such nice details as the carrying of the latrine bucket from the cell daily, about which Dumas with the ignorance of a free person says nothing. You can figure out why Dantès could escape. For years no one searched the cell, whereas cells are supposed to be searched every week. So the tunnel was not discovered. And then they never changed the guard detail, whereas experience tells us that guards should be changed every two hours so one can check on the other. At the Château d'If they didn't enter the cells and look around for days at a time. They didn't even have any peepholes, so d'If wasn't a prison at all, it was a seaside resort. They even left a metal bowl in the cell, with which Dantès could dig through the floor. Then, finally, they trustingly sewed a dead man up in a bag without burning his flesh with a red-hot iron in the morgue and without running him through with a bayonet at the guardhouse. Dumas ought to have tightened up his premises instead of darkening the atmosphere. ~ Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn

How much of a book review is about the reviewer? Sometimes it's mostly about the reviewer! ~ Kathryn Harrison

Who but the sports-mad [Norman] Mailer would liken the battle between God and the Devil to a game of American football? The contest, for sure, has with [sic] own laws (so that after God and the Devil 'tackle a guy, they don't kick him in the head'), but each side is not above cheating - with God breaking the rules occasionally by throwing in 'a miracle'. Strangely, Mailer doesn't mention Jesus in this agonising analogy, but then the notion of the 'super-sub' may be an image too far even for him. ~ Christopher Hitchens

Most books reviews aren't very well-written. They tend to be more about the reviewer than the book. ~ Tibor Fischer

No one loses anyone, because no one owns anyone. That is the true experience of freedom: having the most important thing in the world without owning it ~ Paulo Coelho

Mind is a dark fathomless ocean, and every time I sink into it, this world fades, replaced by one far more terrible and beautiful in which I will happily drown. - New York Times Book Review ~ Neil Gaiman

Perhaps in a book review it is not out of place to note that the safety of the state depends on cultivating the imagination. ~ Stephen Vizinczey

every time a reader leaves a book review, a crippled monkey gets a free banana. I ~ Bobby Adair

The authors of book reviews would consider themselves dishonored were they to mention, as they should, the subject of the book. ~ Louis Aragon

It is now 55 years since my last book report, which is a long time to live with a guilty conscience. So here it is: In the spring of 1956 I wrote a highly favorable review of the Bible without reading a word of it, and it was the last A I ever got in English. Why it has taken so long to come clean I'm not sure, except I have always been extremely sensitive about my academic reputation. ~ Pete Dexter

The power in any society is with those who get to impose the fantasy. It is no longer, as it was for centuries throughout Europe, the church that imposes its fantasy on the populace, nor is it the totalitarian superstate that imposes the fantasy, as it did for 12 years in Nazi Germany and for 69 years in the Soviet Union. Now the fantasy that prevails is the all-consuming, voraciously consumed popular culture, seemingly spawned by, of all things, freedom. The young especially live according to the beliefs that are thought up for them by the society's most unthinking people and by businesses least impeded by innocent ends. Ingeniously as their parents and teachers may attempt to protect the young from being drawn, to their detriment, into the moronic amusement park that is now universal, the preponderance of the power is not with them. ~ Philip Roth

People who like this sort of thing will find this the sort of thing they like.
[in review of a book] ~ Abraham Lincoln

Is it ever worthwhile to buy a review? Not in my opinion. With independent paid review services, quality can be a problem; plus, there are plenty of non-professional book review venues out there that will review for free. ~ Victoria Strauss

PAIN was no longer a cause of suffering, but a source of pleasure, Because they were redeeming humanity from its sins. Pain becomes joy, the meaning of life, pleasure.. ~ Paulo Coelho

An elegantly crafted novel, "The Reluctant First Lady" clearly documents author Venita Ellick as an exceptionally accomplished writer able to skillfully weave memorable characters into a riveting story line from beginning to end. As engaging as it is entertaining, "The Reluctant First Lady" is highly recommended for both personal reading lists and community library contemporary fiction collections. ~ Midwest Book Review August 2013

We think of a feminist as someone a woman becomes in reaction to personal indignities and social injustices. But the truth is, such inequities only awaken her to the feminist she has always fundamentally been - that is, a person who understands that her first responsibility is to her own humanity. That's why, for my money, the first known use of the word 'feminist' is still the best, appearing in an 1895 book review: a woman who 'has in her the capacity of fighting her way back to independence. ~ Susan Faludi

A time to be born, and a time to die;
A time to plant, and a time to pluck up that which is planted;
A time to kill, and a time to heal;
A time to break down, and a time to build up;
A time to weep, and a time to laugh;
A time to mourn, and a time to dance;
a time to cast away stones, and a time to gather stones together;
A time to embrace, and a time to refrain from embracing;
A time to get, and a time to lose;
A time to lose; A time to keep, and a time to cast away;
A time to rend, and a time to sew;
A time to keep silence, and a time to speak;
A time to love, and a time to hate;
A time of war, and a time of peace ~ Paulo Coelho

Remind your humans of the traditional value of the newspaper by helping them to read every time they sit down with one. If there are no newspapers available, shred mail, magazines, checkbooks and other documents to point out the value of stocking less permanent media in the feline household. If your computer skills are up to the task, preorder five years of home delivery of the Sunday New York Times. Now there's a paper you can spend hours killing. Save the magazine and book review for enjoyment later in the week. ~ Michael Ray Taylor

W-MT: There was a book I read about in the New York Times Book Review. It had a red cover, maybe? A.J.: Yeah, that sounds familiar. [Translation: That is excessively vague. Author, title, description of the plot - these are more useful locators. That the cover might have been red and that it was in the New York Times Book Review helps me far less than you might think.] Anything else you remember about it? [Use your words.] ~ Gabrielle Zevin

I look upon book reviews as an infantile disease which new-born books are subject to. ~ Georg C. Lichtenberg

A mom reads you like a book, and wherever she goes, people read you like a glowing book review. ~ Robert Breault

I try not to hate anybody. "Hate is a four-letter word," like the bumper sticker says. But I hate book reviewers.

Book reviewers are the most despicable, loathsome order of swine that ever rooted about the earth. They are sniveling, revolting creatures who feed their own appetites for bile by gnawing apart other people's work. They are human garbage. They all deserve to be struck down by awful diseases described in the most obscure dermatology journals.

Book reviewers live in tiny studios that stink of mothballs and rotting paper. Their breath reeks of stale coffee. From time to time they put on too-tight shirts and pants with buckles and shuffle out of their lairs to shove heaping mayonnaise-laden sandwiches into their faces, which are worn in to permanent snarls. Then they go back to their computers and with fat stubby fingers they hammer out "reviews." Periodically they are halted as they burst into porcine squeals, gleefully rejoicing in their cruelty.

Even when being "kindly," book reviewers reveal their true nature as condescending jerks. "We look forward to hearing more from the author," a book reviewer might say. The prissy tones sound like a second-grade piano teacher, offering you a piece of years-old strawberry hard candy and telling you to practice more.

But a bad book review is just disgusting.

Ask yourself: of all the jobs available to literate people, what monster chooses the job of "telling people how bad ~ Steve Hely

It is not just bookstores and libraries that are disappearing but museums, theaters, performing arts centers, art and music schools - all those places where I felt at home have joined the list of endangered species. The San Francisco Chronicle, the Los Angeles Times, the Boston Globe and my own hometown paper, The Washington Post, have all closed their weekend book review sections, leaving books orphaned and stranded, poor cousins to television and the movies. In a sign of the times, the Bloomberg News website recently transferred its book coverage to the Luxury section, alongside yachts, sports clubs and wine, as if to signal that books are an idle indulgence of the super-rich. But if there is one thing that should not be denied to anyone rich or poor it is the opportunity to dream. ~ Azar Nafisi

A week or so ago I did a two hour book review in Baltimore Maryland. ~ Betty Hill

An inspirational writer's life is an open book that never shuts. Choose your words carefully. ~ Shannon L. Alder

If your life were a book, and you were the author, how would you want your story to go? ~ Amy Purdy

Celaena pulled another book toward her and grinned. It was as if someone had read her mind. It was a large black volume entitled The Walking Dead in tarnished silver letters. Thankfully, the captain didn't see the title before she opened it. ~ Sarah J. Maas

If you would understand this secret, you must first understand the distinction between training an animal and educating one. Trained animals are relatively easy to turn out. All that is required is a book of instructions, a certain amount of bluff and bluster, something to use for threatening and punishing purposes, and of course the animal. Educating an animal, on the other hand, demands keen intelligence, integrity, imagination, and the gentle touch, mentally, vocally, and physically. ~ J. Allen Boone

Then I felt his breath on my ear as he said, voice barely audible, "'I am alone in the world, and yet not alone enough to make each hour holy. I am lowly in this world, and yet not lowly enough for me to be just a thing to you, dark and shrewd. I want my will and I want to go with my will as it moves towards action.'" He paused, long, the only sound his breath, a little ragged, before he went on, "'And I want, in those silent, somehow faltering times, to be with someone who knows, or else alone. I want to reflect everything about you, and I never want to be too blind or too ancient to keep your profound wavering image with me. I want to unfold. I don't want to be folded anywhere, because there, where I'm folded, I am a lie.'"

I turned my face toward his voice, eyes still fast shut, and he put his mouth on mine. I felt his lips pull from mine slightly, just for a moment, and heard the rustle of the book laid gently on the floor, and then he wrapped his arms around me. ~ Maggie Stiefvater

I read usually in the morning, in my kitchen at breakfast - a short reading time, usually poetry. I read in bed every night. I usually get in bed pretty early with a book, and I read until I can't prop my eyes open anymore - sometimes rather late. ~ Sue Monk Kidd

The Amazons is a stupendous achievement
a long-anticipated centerpiece in the great puzzle of humankind. The story of these forbidden women, silenced for so long by the rigidity of traditional scholarship, is as exciting and surprising as a bestselling murder mystery; I simply couldn't put it down. Through scholarly brilliance and passion, Adrienne Mayor has opened the door to a forgotten world of gender equality, and her book ought to be required reading in every college history course. ~ Anne Fortier

Home is where you are appreciated, safe and protected, creative, and where you are loved - not where you are put in prison. ~ Nawal El Saadawi

The last book I picked up had a picture of the Stranger on the front cover. Although his eyes were not nearly as beautiful in my dream state, they still took my breath away. I opened it up curiously and there was one word written in a large, bolded font: FATE. ~ Markelle Grabo

Even in houses commonly held to be 'booky' one finds, nine times out of ten, not a library but a book-dump. ~ Edith Wharton

My history writing was based on what I saw in strange, exotic places rather than just reading books. ~ Tony Judt

Can a literary character be said to live a life from birth to death or otherwise to undergo a development from beginning to end? Or is a literary character-fixed on the pages of a book, trapped forever in the same few words and actions-the very opposite of a living, developing human being? ~ Jack Miles

Maybe you bought this book because you love Sarah Palin and you want to find reasons to hate me. We've got that! I use all kinds of elitist words like "impervious" and "torpor," and I think gay people are just as good at watching their kids play hockey as straight people. Maybe ~ Tina Fey

I like making books but I'm not sure exactly what I'm doing. Perhaps I just try to arrange a bunch of seemingly random drawings into something that makes a vague narrative sense. Sometimes it sort of makes sense, sometimes it doesn't. ~ David Shrigley

Julia could form no opinion of Robert, the bespectacled middle child, for he passed the entire journey with his nose stuck in a book, returning only monosyllabic answers to any questions put to him ~ Sheri Cobb South

It's tricky turning a book into a movie. Sometimes people love the book so much that no adaptation lives up to what they imagined. You can avoid that disappointment by never, ever reading books. ~ Craig Ferguson

My dream scenario would be that you could go into a bookshop, examine copies of every book in print that they're able to offer, then for a fee have them produce in a minute or two a beautiful finished copy in a dust jacket that you would pay for and take home. ~ William Gibson

I don't mind nothing happening in a book, but nothing happening in a phony way
characters saying things people never say, doing jobs that don't fit, the whole works
is simply asking too much of a reader. Something happening in a phony way must beat nothing happening in a phony way every time, right? I mean, you could prove that, mathematically, in an equation, and you can't often apply science to literature. ~ Nick Hornby

When you read the sacred Scriptures, or any other book, never think how you read, but what you read. ~ John Philip Kemble

Most private traders on a losing streak keep trying to trade their way out of a hole. A loser thinks a successful trade is just around the corner, and that his luck is about to turn. He keeps putting on more trades and increases his size, all the while digging himself a deeper hole in the ice. The sensible thing to do would be to reduce your trading size and then stop and review your system. ~ Alexander Elder

The chief beauty of this book lies not so much in its literary style, or in the extent and usefulness of the information it conveys, as in its simple truthfulness. ~ Jerome K. Jerome

Do we take less pride in the possession of our home because its walls were built by some unknown carpenter, its tapestries woven by some unknown weaver on a far Oriental shore, in some antique time? No. We show our home to our friends with the pride as if it were our home, which it is. Why then should we take less pride when reading a book written by some long-dead author? Is it not our book just as much, or even more so, than theirs? So the landowner says, 'Look at my beautiful home! Isn't it fine?' And not, 'Look at the home so-and-so has built.' Thus we shouldn't cry, 'Look what so-and-so has written. What a genius so-and-so is!' But rather, 'Look at what I have read! Am I not a genius? Have I not invented these pages? The walls of this universe, did I not build? The souls of these characters, did I not weave? ~ Roman Payne

When people read, they hear voices and see images in their head. This production is total synesthesia and something close to madness. A great book is an hallucinated IMAX film for one. The author had a feeling, which he turned into words, and the reader gets a feeling from those words - maybe it's the same feeling; maybe it's not. As Peter Mendelsund wrote in What We See When We Read, a book is a coproduction. A reader both performs the book and attends the performance. She is conductor, orchestra, and audience. A book, whether nonfiction of fiction, is an "invitation to daydream. ~ Derek Thompson

You have to surrender to a book. If you do, when something in it seems to be going askew, you are wounded. The more you have surrendered to a book, the more jarring its errors appear. ~ Robert Gottlieb

Could I be jealous of the way he was touching my horse? Yep ... I was. ~ Carly Kade

That was a page read and turned over; I was busy now with this new page, and when the engine whistled on the grade, this page would be finished and another begun; and so the book of life goes on, page after page and pages without end - when one is young. ~ Jack London

The third one is culturing the mind. One who has never meditated has no right to even touch the book of Ashtavakra. ~ Sri Sri Ravi Shankar

You're still trying to protect me. Real or not real," he whispers.
"Real," I answer. "Because that's what you and I do, protect each other. ~ Suzanne Collins

It's a gift," she said, her voice funny, deep with emotion. "Watching you all get close, witnessing all that happened making you closer, feeling that love. But it was another gift, maybe even a bigger one, precious, knowing that sharing it makes people I don't know laugh. It makes them happy. Some of them write to me. They tell me bad things are happening in their lives. But they read my book and it takes them away. It makes them smile. Laugh. Even if for moments, or better yet hours, they can forget the bad, be with us here at Fortnum's, and laugh." She tipped her head to the side. "That's beautiful. So how can it be wrong? ~ Kristen Ashley

There was a time in my demented youth
When somehow I suspected that the truth
About survival after death was known
To every human being: I alone
Knew nothing, and a great conspiracy
Of books and people hid the truth from me. ~ Vladimir Nabokov

People really need to take time and read a book, you know, that's my advice. You could read 'A New Slant on Life,' you could read 'Dianetics.' And I think if you really read it, you'll understand it, but unless you do, you'll speculate. And I think that's a mistake to do that. ~ John Travolta

It's like, you write a book, you want it to be well received, you want it to be at the top of the bestsellers list, but you have limited control over what happens. You can hire a publicist, you can do every interview, you can be prepared, but you have very little control over the marketplace. So you put it out there without attachment, so it has its own life. Everything is like that. ~ Dan Harris

Metal guys are huge nerds. A good percentage of them are either horror or sci-fi or comic book or fantasy nerds. ~ Scott Ian

I think it's a very old and deep-seated double standard that holds that when a man writes about family and feelings, it's literature with a capital L, but when a woman considers the same topics, it's romance, or a beach book - in short, it's something unworthy of a serious critic's attention. ~ Jennifer Weiner

I should rather like to tear these last pages out of the book. Shall I? No-a journal ought not to cheat. ~ Dodie Smith

Sometimes when Rose was reading, she would catch a whiff of the musty smell of her book. She put her nose down in the fold and inhaled deeply so that wonderful smell, the smell of adventure in faraway lands, would fill her up. She rubbed her hand across the pages to feel the velvety surface of the paper. When she closed her eyes, her fingertips could even feel the words that were printed there, each letter raised just a little, almost like the special language that her blind aunt Mary could read.
To Rose, a book was as real and alive as if it breathed and walked and spoke. ~ Roger Lea MacBride

The doings of men, their prayers, fear, wrath, pleasure, delights, and recreations, are the subject of this book.
[Lat., Quicquid agunt homines, votum, timor, ira, voluptas, gaudia, discursus, nostri est farrago libelli.] ~ Juvenal

Williams, having awarded Orwell the title of exile, immediately replaces it with the description 'vagrant'. A vagrant will, for example, not be reassured or comforted by Williams's not-very-consoling insistence that '"totalitarian" describes a certain kind of repressive social control, but, also, any real society, any adequate community, is necessarily a totality. To belong to a community is to be a part of a whole, and, necessarily, to accept, while helping to define, its disciplines.' In other words, Williams is inviting Orwell and all of us to step back inside the whale! Remember your roots, observe the customs of the tribe, recognise your responsibilities. The life of the vagrant or exile is unwholesome, even dangerous or deluded. The warmth of the family and the people is there for you; so is the life of the 'movement.' If you must criticize, do so from within and make sure that your criticisms are constructive.

This rather peculiar attempt to bring Orwell back into the fold is reinforced by this extraordinary sentence: 'The principle he chose was socialism, and Homage to Catalonia is still a moving book (quite apart from the political controversy it involves) because it is a record of the most deliberate attempt he ever made to become part of a believing community.' I leave it to any reader of those pages to find evidence for such a proposition; it is true that Orwell was very moved by the Catalan struggle and by the friends he made in the course of it. But h ~ Christopher Hitchens

Most of my books are set in the American Midwest, where I have always lived. Midwesterners are lovely, down-to-earth people. The luxury of choosing this region as a setting is the endless supply of seasonal change images that accompany it; in addition to, the wide variety of settings, urban and rural, to choose from. ~ Leigh Michaels

But life is glorious when it is happy; days are carefree when they are happy; the interplay of thought and imagination is far and superior to that of muscle and sinew. Let me tell you, if you don't know it from your own experience, that reading a good book, losing yourself in the interest of words and thoughts, is for some people (me, for instance) an incredible intensity of happiness. ~ Isaac Asimov