Book Quotes

And each book has to receive your best effort every single time. No slacking.

But things such as 'Harry Potter', all I can do is shape my character, seek the director's approval on that, and basically take it from there. Professor Flitwick in 'Harry Potter', I kind of defined how I saw him from reading the book, and luckily that matched up with the director's vision.

I'd like to read a book sometime. I've never read a book before. That'd be an adventure. I understand they have pages and everything. Yeah, I've got to do that sometime.

Having reached the halfway mark in the alphabet, my prime focus is on writing each new book as well as I can.

No one ever committed suicide while reading a good book, but many have tried while trying to write one.

A good writer is not, per se, a good book critic. No more so than a good drunk is automatically a good bartender.

It was actually Peter's idea that I should make the film. He called me in the very beginning, and I hadn't even read the book. So I read it and I liked it very much and I knew I'd certainly like to do it.

In the initial season of a show, you're figuring out your character and their life and their background and you're putting together all the chapters of the book.

Book tours and research provide a lot of travel - too much, I sometimes think, but we do take vacations.

Some of the most famous books are the least worth reading. Their fame was due to their having done something that needed to be doing in their day. The work is done and the virtue of the book has expired.

Each book first begins with a little idea.

If anybody reads a story in a magazine or book, different pictures compete in their minds.

I was 8 years old when I went across the street from my house to a fair, and they always had a used book sale. For a quarter I bought a book called 'Come On Seabiscuit.' I loved that book. It stayed with me all those years.

My mother gave me this book called Feature Films at Used Car Prices by a guy named Rick Schmidt. I gotta credit the guy, cuz he gave me the most practical advice. It empowers you.

There's also something of an illusion in that, you can perhaps record a TV thing one month and complete a book the next and then be in a play. Then, if they all come out at once, it looks as if you're actually juggling a million things.

The good of a book lies in its being read. A book is made up of signs that speak of other signs, which in their turn speak of things. Without an eye to read them, a book contains signs that produce no concepts; therefore it is dumb.

My writing has to support more than my research habit, but I love to curl up with a book about some dusty corner of history.

If a woman writes about family and about the connections between people and what it means to be alive in this day and time, it's called women's fiction. And if a man does it, it's nominated for a National Book Award. What - you can't have a heart and a penis? That doesn't make sense.

When it was suggested that I write a memoir I said, 'I'm not old enough. I'm not distinguished enough.' But I went home and sat down to write, and the material for the book just came flooding into my hands.

No agent wants to see a book until he or she has decided whether to pursue the relationship.

And I think that being able to make people laugh and write a book that's funny makes the information go down a lot easier and it makes it a lot more fun to read, easier to understand, and often stronger. So there's all kinds of advantages to it.

May I say, finally, that I have no illusions of grandeur; quite to the contrary, I am very humble in my knowledge that through forty years of my life my life has been an open book of service to my fellow architects and for the public good.

I enjoyed doing the gag covers better than the story ones because they were usually simpler. A cover based on an incident in the plot took a great deal of staging to tell a little story that was still part of the book. And it had to make sense on its own.

As soon as I finished the first book, I wrote a second, which I hope to sell this year, and I have just about finished the third book in the series. Two more are already outlined. I'm in this for the long haul.

You've got to live life to write a book about it.

About seven years later I was given a book about the periodic table of the elements. For the first time I saw the elegance of scientific theory and its predictive power.

My generation was not only maligned in book reviews and attacked in graduate school but we lived to see our adored and adorable daughters wonder why feminism had become a dirty word.

My shorthand answer is that I try to write the kind of book that I would like to read. If I can make it clear and interesting and compelling to me, then I hope maybe it will be for the reader.

To me I think artists in general make a statement - and for the rest of their lives - every album, every book - are variations on a theme.

I was about 13, in some ways, when I wrote the first book. Approximately 18 when I wrote the second.