Book Quotes

Style and Structure are the essence of a book; great ideas are hogwash.

I like cooking but I don't know much and whenever I enter the kitchen, my mother sends me out! Because whenever I try a dish from a book, it comes out bad.

First of all there is always that artistic challenge of creating something. Or the particular experience to take slum life in that period and make something out of it in the form of a book. And then I felt some kind of responsibility to my family.

The first time I read an excellent work, it is to me just as if I gained a new friend; and when I read over a book I have perused before, it resembles the meeting of an old one.

You can never step into the same book twice, because you are different each time you read it.

I've started working on a new album, I'm writing a new book... there are a lot of good things on the horizon.

It was a book to kill time for those who like it better dead.

I think, especially when you're in college, each book that you're reading tends to tell you who you are.

Except a living man, there is nothing more wonderful than a book.

And religion causes most of the problems, war, and economics of course, and study your history or you're going to repeat it; and if you're burning a Harry Potter book you need some serious counseling, you don't get it, you're missing the whole point.

Perfect heroines, like perfect heroes, aren't relatable, and if you can't put yourself in the protagonist's shoes, not only will they not inspire you, but the book will be pretty boring.

In my book I don't just demonstrate that free enterprise is the most efficient way of organizing an economy - which it is. I also show that it's an expression of American values, and, thus, that a fight for free enterprise is very much a fight for our culture.

Interpreter of Maladies is the title of one of the stories in the book. And the phrase itself was something I thought of before I even wrote that story.

In the first book of my Discworld series, published more than 26 years ago, I introduced Death as a character; there was nothing particularly new about this - death has featured in art and literature since medieval times, and for centuries we have had a fascination with the Grim Reaper.

I think we have some serious problems now, but, if you look back over the last thirty or forty years that my book deals with, I think we are in better shape now than we would have been if all of those cases had not come down.

To be quite honest, I've been very blessed when I've worked with Hollywood. The studios that have purchased my work to be adapted to film have really liked the work and wanted to stay as close as they could to what the book was.

Writing a children's book means you cannot spin out long narratives or have complex character development.

Court TV. I can't stop watching it. I am absolutely obsessed! If I'm not reading a book or spending time with my husband, my friends or my dog, I am watching Court TV.

You can't get a cup of tea big enough or a book long enough to suit me.

I don't know how Frank presented the old Mothers, since I never read the book. There might be some opinions on what he said, but I - or anyone else - could not make any corrections to anything Frank did.

One of the things I have tried to do with this book and with all of them really is avoid that simple, easy, reductionist view of motivation and to show we do things for a complex net of reasons, a real braid of reasons.

I first got to know Charles in the late seventies when I wrote an article and then a book about him and I think at the time he came across as quite appealing, it was probably the height of his popularity.

When you re-read a classic you do not see in the book more than you did before. You see more in you than there was before.

At religious instruction classes, I encountered The Pilgrims Progress by John Bunyan, and the sincerity of the traveller in that book was overwhelming.

Because I'm such a creative person, and I've always got my nose in a book, I suppose it was only a matter of time before non-fiction turned into fiction again. But I never consciously set out to become a writer and I never thought I'd be doing the things I'm doing today.

I think my books talk about kids learning to like and respect themselves and each other. You can't write a message book; you just tell the best story you know how to tell.

I read the book of Job last night, I don't think God comes out well in it.

The English Bible - a book which, if everything else in our language should perish, would alone suffice to show the whole extent of its beauty and power.

So, how to stay inside the world of entertainment without actually getting another job? I felt the only logical answer was to become a novelist. So I wrote the first book - driven by some very real feelings of desperation - and it worked.

I was very influenced by The Magic Mountain. It's a book that had a huge impact on me. I loved that as a shape for a novel: put a bunch of people in a beautiful place, give them all tuberculosis, make them all stay in a fur sleeping bag for several years and see what happens.