Best 19526 quotes in «book quotes» category

If you take out of your statutes, your constitution, your family life all that is taken from the Sacred Book, what would there be left to bind society together?

If you talk about genres - I don't care if you're talking about war, Westerns, science fiction, horror, fantasy, humor, romance - anything you can find, strolling the aisles of a Borders or a Barnes & Noble, I can bring you many comic books representing each genre.

If you taught me to read and provided for me the same computer system as someone has provided for Stephen Hawking, I, too, would write great books. And yet you don't teach me to read, and you don't give me a computer stick I can push around with my nose to point at the next letter I wish typed. So whose fault is it that I am what I am?

If you think about movies that are adapted from books, they never feel like enough. There's always too much cut out in the end. You either make a five hour movie or you leave out stuff that should be in there.

If you think reading a book is hard, you should try writing one. Because it's even harder. It's still not as hard as writing a game, though. If you discount the purely visual pop-up parts, a book is made almost entirely of words. As a novelist, you just need to think of a few decent strings of words and then fill the other 98% of the book with more or less random descriptions of things and exclamation points.

If you tell certain people that you like Kerouac, they assume that's all you read, like you don't know anything else about literature. I recognize all the things that people dislike about the way he writes - his tone and the sentimentality of it all. But those books were there for me at a very important point in my life.

If you think it's worth writing a book about then that means you suspect that you're not the only one. You suspect that it has something to do with the larger patterns of your culture.

If you think you have it tough, read history books.

If you think of even Tolstoy or a book like 'Anna Karenina,' you go from character to character, and each section is from the third person perspective of a different character, so you get to see the whole world a little more kaleidoscopically that way. That's traditional narrative manner, and I haven't done a book like that before, but I enjoyed it.

If you think success is about so many more things and is so much more arbitrary, then you can be much more open to the idea that you can be Ben Fountain and publish your great book at forty-nine.

If you think you can temper yourself into manliness by sitting here over your books, it is the very silliest fancy that ever tempted a young man to his ruin. You cannot dream yourself into a character; you must hammer and forge yourself one.

If you truly love a book, you should sleep with it, write in it, read aloud from it, and fill its pages with muffin crumbs.

If you've been married for 400 years, as I have, it's nice to experience first love again and you can vicariously through a book.

If you try to control it too much, the book is dead. You have to let it fall apart quite early on and let it start doing its own thing. And that takes nerve, not to panic that the book you were going to write is not the book you will have at the end of the day.

If you've got a good book with you, you're never bored (or alone).

If you've got comic book fans and soap fans and country fans, I think you've hit the whole world. What else is there?

If you've really loved a book, or a movie for that matter, really loved it, what you want is that same book again, but as if you've never read it. And when you get something unfamiliar, you feel betrayed.

If you've seen my books through the years, I've always been a storyteller.

If you wait until you got time to write a novel, or time to write a story, or time to read the hundred thousands of books you should have already read - if you wait for the time, you will never do it. ‘Cause there ain’t no time; world don’t want you to do that. World wants you to go to the zoo and eat cotton candy, preferably seven days a week.

If you want a favorite book, Orson Scott Card's 'Ender's Game'. You'll be hooked. I think he's written like twelve or thirteen.

If you want a convincing account of just how deep the shift in our new axial age is and must be, look no further than this brilliant book by Charles Eisenstein, one of the deepest integrative thinkers active today.

If you want intelligent children give them a book. If you want more intelligent children give them more books.

If you want to be happy, then it is within your grasp. The book you are holding can have a profound impact on your thinking and your attitude and can help you to do more, be more, and achieve more!

If you want to catch the right mental attitude, go where that attitude exists. Start by going to the people who have the right mental attitude. If the right people aren't always available, then go the right book, or to the right recording of a dynamic speaker.

If you want to do this - either write for TV, or write books - the first thing you have to do is write a lot. And I mean a ridiculous amount.

If you want to be changed, read a good book.

If you want to be a writer, you should go into the largest library you can find and stand there contemplating the books that have been written. Then you should ask yourself, 'Do I really have anything to add?' If you have the arrogance or the humility to say yes, you will know you have the vocation.

If you want to make a name for yourself, the oldest trick in the book is to attack what everybody else reveres.

If you want to read about love and marriage, you've got to buy two separate books.

If you want to hurt me, fine. Take my books. Burn down my house. Shave my head while I am sleeping. But nobody, nobody screws with my dog.

If you want to live a top shelf life then you need to stand on the books you have read. Never stop learning, never stop growing.

If you want to get ahead in this world get a lawyer -- not a book.

If you want to get together in any exclusive situation and have people love you, fine - but to hang all this desperate sociology on the idea of The Cloud-Guy who has The Big Book, who knows if you've been bad or good - and CARES about any of it - to hang it all on that, folks, is the chimpanzee part of the brain working.

If you want to learn the craft of war, ponder over this book. The teacher is as a needle, the disciple is as thread. You must practice constantly.

If you want to have a creative culture, you can't get it by reading books. You get it by example.

If you want to make a little money, write a book. If you want to make a lot of money, create a religion.

If you want to publish two books a year under your own name and your publisher doesn't, maybe you need a different publisher.

If you want to read a perfect book there is only one way: write it.

If you want to pontificate, I'm certainly willing to pontificate. That's why Joely was laughing because you don't know what you asked for. Malcolm Gladwell, in his newest book "David and Goliath," writes about how sometimes things that we think of as handicaps often times are just the opposite. Or the reverse is also true.

If you want to reduce the rats, use the cats! If you want to reduce the fools, use the books!

If you want to write about a person who isn't nice, people say, "This is a bad book. It's about somebody I couldn't stand." But that's not the point. You don't have to like a character to like a book. Most of the time, people would misjudge and say, "I didn't like the book." No, you didn't like the character. That doesn't make it any less interesting of a book. In fact, to me, it makes it more interesting.

If you want to write something completely unique, you will probably fail or at best write something without redeeming value. The mind works in certain patterns: the mind organizes facts in story form; it is your commonality with that body of human thought that makes a good book, not its estrangement from the common values that humans share.

If you want to write a book that's very successful and famous, then it's hard. If you just want to get published, all you have to do is convince an editor that your idea will make them money.

If you were a medieval scholar reading a book, you knew that there was a reasonable likelihood you'd never see that particular text again, and so a high premium was placed on remembering what you read. You couldn't just pull a book off the shelf to consult it for a quote or an idea.

If you were to second guess your decision to book some time to visit an Indian community, that would be a reservation reservation reservation.

If you want to write, do two things - read lots of books and also, in your own writing, practise. Just write and write and then write again. persist. And never be put off or discouraged. You can do it!

If you were to loose the habit of making the effort to get the book and read the words one by one you would have lost something terribly important. So I think that we have a task to ensure that this doesn't happen.

If you wish to be a lawyer, attach no consequence to the place you are in, or the person you are with; but get books, sit down anywhere, and go to reading for yourself. That will make a lawyer of you quicker than any other way.

If you would understand your own age, read the works of fiction produced in it. People in disguise speak freely.

If you would ask my mom what books I liked growing up, I liked Dr. Seuss.