Book Quotes

I got $30 from Nation magazine for a poem and $500 for my first book of poems.

My first book took five years to write and I made $1,000 on it. The second took three years and I made $3,000. All this time I was a housewife being supported by a husband. I was very lucky.

When it comes time to sit down and write the next book, you're deathly afraid that you're not up to the task. That was certainly the case with me after Snow Falling on Cedars.

What makes a book great, a so-called classic, it its quality of always being modern, of its author, though he be long dead, continuing to speak to each new generation.

I was not allowed to take notes but my friend and I memorised those two and a half pages. Most people talked to me because of the warning. They knew this book was not going to be the official line.

I lived with them in my studio in New York. And of course if I were doing that book today or even ten years, fifteen years later, I would have gone to where the wild ducks were and where I could study them - I would have gone to the country somewhere.

I write synopses after the book is completed. I can't write it beforehand, because I don't know what the book's about. I invent something for my publisher because he asks for one, but the final book ends up very differently.

My book is traditional. It runs counter to the post-modern spirit.

I've been asked this question so many times, do you feel you need to write a book for adults? No, I don't need to write a book for adults.

I mean, if someone asked for my birth certificate, I'd get my baby book and hand it out and say 'Here it is.'

The concentration in my book on Marie Antoinette's childhood and on her family influences. It is surprising how some books actually start with her arrival in France!

When you meet someone for the first time, that's not the whole book. That's just the first page.

I was reading a book... 'the history of glue' - I couldn't put it down.

Promiscuity is like never reading past the first page. Monogamy is like reading the same book over and over.

There's nothing that makes you so aware of the improvisation of human existence as a song unfinished. Or an old address book.

I was gravely warned by some of my female acquaintances that no woman could expect to be regarded as a lady after she had written a book.

There must be freedom for all to live, to think, to worship, no book, no avenue must be closed.

In the book of Colossians, it talks about that because of what Christ did, we are pure. We are without judgment on ourselves. And only through him can we do something like this.

I started thinking about my relationship with my students; I'm this guy who comes in from book - and movie - land and descends on angel wings into their classroom.

I don't know what your childhood was like, but we didn't have much money. We'd go to a movie on a Saturday night, then on Wednesday night my parents would walk us over to the library. It was such a big deal, to go in and get my own book.

Honestly, so much of my book is about the best things in my life have happened since I'm 40.

But, you know, I just did a big trip in the spring to Vietnam and Cambodia and Thailand, and that's when I bought a Kindle. I have like 15 books on this one little gizmo. But when I came home, the first night I picked up the book that was on my nightstand and I went right back to that.

I did go there later, but I hadn't been there before I wrote the book. Sometimes I feel like the imagined can feel more real than the real?

My book has a lot of parts of my life that people don't know about.

'Tis pleasant, sure, to see one's name in print. A book's a book, although there's nothing in 't.

More than four thousand programs produced and consumed. Some of them were pretty good, a great many of them were forgettable; but a handful may even be worth a book.

A travel book is about someone who goes somewhere, travels on the ground, sees something and spends quite a lot of time doing it, and has a hard time, and then comes back and writes about it. It's not about inventing.

A well-composed book is a magic carpet on which we are wafted to a world that we cannot enter in any other way.

I've bought pretty much every book ever written about the Alamo, and I talk to my friends that I've made over the past 15, 20 years. It's just a constant learning and fascinating thing for me.

God forbid that any book should be banned. The practice is as indefensible as infanticide.