Lousy Book Quotes

Would that I were still a ludicrous character in his lousy book! ~ Philip Roth

There is no money in the world that would compensate me for writing a lousy book. ~ David Lagercrantz

Reading a book, for me at least, is like traveling in someone else's world. If it's a good book, then you feel comfortable and yet anxious to see what's going to happen to you there, what'll be around the next corner. But if it's a lousy book, then it's like going through Secaucus, New Jersey
it smells and you wish you weren't there, but since you've started the trip, you roll up the windows and breathe through your mouth until you're done. ~ Jonathan Carroll

She still remembers the effect a certain book can have on people at the right time in their lives. A book, at its most mundane,can be a loaded gun. At its most powerful, it can split the trunk of a tree, mend a broken heart, heal the sick, and topple a corrupt government. ~ Don Borchert

I always try to have a book on hand, traveling is an excellent way of providing perspective, and studying Art History has made going to art museums way more fun than you can imagine. ~ Gideon Glick

Lack of accomplishment is one thing; deceit is quite another. Everyone who has followed her career knows that Hillary is dishonest to the core, a "congenital liar" as columnist William Safire once put it. The writer Christopher Hitchens titled his book about the Clintons No One Left to Lie To. Even Hollywood mogul David Geffen, an avid progressive, said a few years ago of the Clintons, "Everybody in politics lies but they do it with such ease, it's troubling."3 ~ Dinesh D'Souza

They came down from the avenue of the stars... they spoke the magical language of the stars in the heavens... Yes, their sign is our certainty that they came from the heavens... and when they come down from the heavens again they will create new order among their creation of long ago. ~ Chilam Balam Book Of Tizimin

Frightened, he runs off to the silent fields
and howls aloud, attempting speech in vain;
foam gathers at the corners of his mouth;
he turns his lust for slaughter on the flocks,
and mangles them, rejoicing still in blood.
His garments now become a shaggy pelt;
his arms turn into legs, and he, to wolf
while still retaining traces of the man:
greyness the same, the same cruel visage,
the same cold eyes and bestial appearance. ~ The story of King Lycaon from Ovid's Metamorphosis, Book I, ll. 321-331 tr. Charles Martin ~ Ovid

Shut the door, they're coming through the window, shut the window, they're coming through the door, are the words to an old song. They fit my lifestyle with newly arriving butcher/censors every month. Only six weeks ago, I discovered that, over the years, some cubby-hole editors at Ballantine Books, fearful of contaminating the young, had, bit by bit, censored some 75 separate sections from the novel. Students, reading the novel which, after all, deals with censorship and book-burning in the future, write to tell me of this exquisite irony ... ~ Ray Bradbury

There is an aversion to long chunks of sentences...The dire problem is that long chunks of sentences are still the best way humans have to express complex thoughts, intricate observations, fleeting emotions-the whole range of what we are...It is unclear whether the American attention span can support book reading for much longer... ~ Dick Meyer

Authors whose books were selected as ASEs were rewarded with a loyal readership of millions of men. Word spread quickly about the titles that were perennial favorites, even reaching the home front. F. Scott Fitzgerald's The Great Gatsby, which was written in 1925, was considered a failure during Fitzgerald's lifetime. But when this book was printed as an ASE in October 1945, it won the hearts of an army of men. Their praise reverberated back home, and The Great Gatsby was rescued from obscurity and has since become an American literary classic. ~ Molly Guptill Manning

The free market is not a system. It is not a policy dictated by anyone in particular. It is not something that Washington implements. It does not exist in any legislation, law, bill, regulation, or book. It is what you get when people act on their own, entirely without central direction, and with their own property, and within human associations of their own creation and in their own interest. It is the beauty that emerges in absence of control. ~ Jeffrey Tucker

I held up the book - Green Eggs and Ham - and began reading. I smiled; it was one of my favorite books from my childhood. ~ Angela Graham

Obey thy parents, keep thy word justly; swear not; commit not with man's sworn spouse; set not thy sweet heart on proud array. * * * Keep thy foot out of brothels, thy pen from lenders' books. ~ William Shakespeare

Nothing written in any book is a perfect reflection of truth.( ... )
No teachings and no bibles on earth are perfect. They can never be
so, for this is an imperfect universe. The perfection isn't here,
it is in the worlds beyond, and this is what we are trying to reach. ~ Harold Klemp

When adults say, "Teenagers think they are invincible" with that sly, stupid smile on their faces, they don't know how right they are. We need never be hopeless, because we can never be irreparably broken. We think that we are invincible because we are. We cannot be born, and we cannot die. Like all energy, we can only change shapes and sizes and manifestations. They forget that when they get old. They get scared of losing and failing. But that part of us greater than the sum of our parts cannot begin and cannot end, and so it cannot fail. ~ John Green

Green chemistry is replacing our industrial chemistry with nature's recipe book. It's not easy, because life uses only a subset of the elements in the periodic table. And we use all of them, even the toxic ones. ~ Janine Benyus

The most popular cartoon of mine is a guy on the phone looking at his appointment book and saying "No, Thursday's out. How about never, is never good for you?" ~ Robert Mankoff

Stealing ideas from contemporaries is rude and tasteless. Stealing from the long dead is considered literary and admirable. The same is true of grave-robbing. Loot your local cemetery and find yourself mired in social awkwardness. But unearth the tomb of an ancient king and you can feel free to pop off his toe rings. You'll probably end up on a book tour, or bagging an honorary degree or two. ~ N.D. Wilson

We put on a pot of tea, a necessity between these two writing friends. We
could no more imagine writing without this hot sustenance than we could
without pen and paper. We sat at the table to talk shop, sort through our
notes, and make plans for the book. Then we settled down in the sunroom,
giggling a little at the unexpected absurdity of our activity, editing
within arm's reach of each other, like toddlers at parallel play. ~ Mary Potter Kenyon

Books are a treasured friend, however it's difficult to explain it to a non-reader. ~ Aman Jassal

Whatever poetry that was in me was coming out in the form of constructing art books! ~ Stephen Vincent Benet

I learned that you can't write a book in the margins of your life. I'd forgotten how much uninterrupted time it takes to write chapters, and how you have to push everything else aside and really focus. ~ Melissa Harris-Perry

I can't imagine Hunger Games, even with its very popular books, being nearly a success that it's been without Jen Lawrence being the perfect person to play that role - a very modern celebrity, a very down-to-earth, accessible, celebrity. ~ Nina Jacobson

I prop my guitar up against the nightstand. Then I turn toward the bed and fall into it face first. The mattress is soft but firm, like a sheet of steel wrapped in a cloud. I roll around, moaning loud and long.

"Oh, that's good. Really, really good. What a grand bed!"

Sarah clears her throat. "Well. We should probably get to sleep, then. Big day tomorrow."

The pillow smells sweet, like candy. I can only imagine it's from her. I wonder if I pressed my nose to the crook of her neck, would her skin smell as delicious?

I brush away the thought as I watch her stiffly gather a pillow and blanket from the other side of the bed, dragging them to . . . the nook.

"What are you doing?"

She looks up, her doe eyes widening. "Getting ready for bed."

"You're going to sleep there?"

"Of course. The sofa's very uncomfortable."

"Why can't we share the bed?"

She chokes . . . stutters. "I . . . I can't sleep with you. I don't even know you."

I throw my arms out wide. "What do you want to know? Ask me anything - I'm an open book."

"That's not what I mean."

"You're being ridiculous! It's a huge bed. You could let one rip and I wouldn't hear it."

And the blush is back. With a vengeance.

"I'm not . . . I don't . . ."

"You don't fart?" I scoff. "Really? Are you not human?"

She curses under her breath, but I'd love to ~ Emma Chase

You can't just walk away when you see a good book but to buy and own it. ~ Lailah Gifty Akita

The way of kings / Brandon Sanderson. - 1st ed. p. cm. "A Tom Doherty Associates book." ISBN 978-1-4299-9280-0 (e-book) I. Title. PS3619.A533W375 2010 813'.6 - dc22 2010034369 ~ Brandon Sanderson

You need not expect to get your book right the first time. Go to work and revamp or rewrite it. God only exhibits his thunder and lightning at intervals, and so they always command attention. These are God's adjectives. You thunder and lightning too much; the reader ceases to get under the bed, by and by. ~ Mark Twain

On the back part of the step, toward the right, I saw a small iridescent sphere of almost unbearable brilliance. At first I thought it was revolving; then I realised that this movement was an illusion created by the dizzying world it bounded. The Aleph's diameter was probably little more than an inch, but all space was there, actual and undiminished. Each thing (a mirror's face, let us say) was infinite things, since I distinctly saw it from every angle of the universe. I saw the teeming sea; I saw daybreak and nightfall; I saw the multitudes of America; I saw a silvery cobweb in the center of a black pyramid; I saw a splintered labyrinth (it was London); I saw, close up, unending eyes watching themselves in me as in a mirror; I saw all the mirrors on earth and none of them reflected me; I saw in a backyard of Soler Street the same tiles that thirty years before I'd seen in the entrance of a house in Fray Bentos; I saw bunches of grapes, snow, tobacco, lodes of metal, steam; I saw convex equatorial deserts and each one of their grains of sand; I saw a woman in Inverness whom I shall never forget; I saw her tangled hair, her tall figure, I saw the cancer in her breast; I saw a ring of baked mud in a sidewalk, where before there had been a tree; I saw a summer house in Adrogué and a copy of the first English translation of Pliny -- Philemon Holland's -- and all at the same time saw each letter on each page (as a boy, I used to marvel that the letters in a closed book did not ge ~ Jorge Luis Borges

There should be relentless exposure of and attack upon every evil practice, whether in politics, in business, or in social life. I hail as a benefactor every writer or speaker, every man who, on the platform, or in book, magazine or newspaper, with merciless severity makes such attack, provided always that he in his turn remembers that the attack is of use only if it is absolutely truthful. ~ Theodore Roosevelt

I love outsider stories. And I also like a lot of genre fiction, too. So I wanted to write a literary book that flirted with thriller and fantasy and even science fiction. I wanted the coming-of-age story and the love story to be about "outsiderdom" - one of the themes I am most interested in. ~ Porochista Khakpour

What's my favourite book? It changes all the time. ~ Kevin Spacey

Each soul is potentially divine. The goal is to manifest this divinity by controlling nature, external and internal. Do this either by work, or worship, or psychic control, or philosophy - by one, or more, or all of these - and be free. This is the whole of religion. Doctrines, or dogmas, or rituals, or books, or temples, or forms, are but secondary details. ~ Swami Vivekananda

Overall, I was generally "delighted" with the book's story -- writing, theme, plot, etc. Seriously, though, I really did revel in it. After all, "what is a book for if not for our enjoyment? ~ Chris Mentillo

Any room in our house at any time in the day was there to read in or to be read to. ~ Eudora Welty

It is more than love, barely less than madness. It's never close enough. ~ C.J. Carlyon

I was in trouble, my life was a moderate-going-on-severe mess, and not being able to write was only part of it. I wasn't raping kids or running around Times Square preaching conspiracy theories through a bullhorn, but I was in trouble just the same. I had lost my place in things and couldn't find it again. No surprise there; after all, life's not a book. ~ Stephen King

Never trust anybody with only one book. ~ Billy Connolly

An album is like a book or a diary or a snapshot ... It just feels so like the end of a chapter when you finish one. ~ Chet Faker

I found this book simple but very deep, some chapters on the heavy side but well worth reading for the new comers and also for the veteran in the field of meditation ~ Muktananda

I published my first book in 1982 - a collection of Irish folklore called Irish Folk & Fairy Tales. It is still in print today. My first young adult book was published a couple of years later, and I've been writing in both genres ever since. ~ Michael Scott

William Waltz will take me through 'the buzz and clamor in a forest of hearts.' Adventures in the Lost Interiors of America is an adventure, I will go on this adventure with Waltz as a skillful, faithful, compass-true guide. I love this book. ~ James Tate

It is worth mentioning, for future reference,that the creative power which bubbles so pleasantly in beginning a new book quiets down after a time, and one goes on more steadily. Doubts creep in. Then one becomes resigned. Determination not to give in, and the sense of an impending shape keep one at it more than anything. ~ Virginia Woolf

I read five books on the Constitution. My favorite was 'Plain, Honest Men' by Richard Beeman. I went on a science jag in the same way. I kept getting in arguments about evolution and being bested. So I read Charles Darwin's 'On the Origin of the Species,' a fantastic book that is not that difficult. ~ Denis O'Hare