Book Quotes

I'm going to have to be impressed and feel confident in the people I'm handing a book to - or I'm not going to do it. Once you hand it to them, you're out. You have no control over it.

The comments I most appreciate come from ordinary readers who've happened on one of my books at some time of stress in their lives, and who actually credit the book with helping them through a bad time. It's happened a few times in forty years.

I'm always prepared for the worst. I was prepared to have the book come out, sell seven copies, and have to keep working in advertising, so it was just great that it was received so well and by such a huge audience.

I get intrigued by a puzzle, and writing a book is the best way to solve it.

My book is focused on the power of the American state, not least because the government of the United States governs so much that the case could be made that everybody around the world ought to have a vote in determining some of its policies.

I receive about 10,000 letters a year from readers, and in the first year after a book is published, perhaps 5,000 letters will deal specifically with that piece of work.

It's just a matter of writing the kind of book I enjoy reading. Something better be happening at the beginning, and then on every page after, or I get irritated.

I realize now I could have gotten a whole book out of that and so I think that was a big mistake. But the truth is you write in the moment and with your head down and there is no way back then that I could have conceived of Harry having the longevity that he has had.

Writers are not just people who sit down and write. They hazard themselves. Every time you compose a book your composition of yourself is at stake.

When I write a book, I'm making it the best book I can.

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.

Every time I finish a book, I forget everything I learned writing it - the information just disappears out of my head.

I don't claim to be knowledgeable about theology. Most of my knowledge comes out of my experience and the lessons in the Bible. Every Sunday I'm home I teach 45 minutes and we boiled them down to one page for the new book, 'Through the Year with Jimmy Carter.'

The question is, are we happy to suppose that our grandchildren may never be able to see an elephant except in a picture book?

Three publishers came to me at the White House after George lost and said, 'We would like to publish your book.' I said, well, I don't have a book, and they said well it's a well known fact that you have kept diaries.

I've been bragging for over 25 years that my first New York Times bestseller was a book I copied from the U.S. Government Printing Office!

It is more than a book, it is an institution which rules the Christian world.

On the other hand, I still approach each book with the same basic plan in mind - to put some people under severe stress and see how they hold up.

Every ceremony or rite has a value if it is performed without alteration. A ceremony is a book in which a great deal is written. Anyone who understands can read it. One rite often contains more than a hundred books.

Never read a book through merely because you have begun it.

Even after Sword was published, I was still only thinking about the next book, Elfstones.

Strange to the world, he wore a bashful look, The fields his study, Nature was his book.

A good day is one where I can not just read a book, but write a review of it. Maybe today I'll be able to do that. I get for some reason somewhat stronger when the sun starts to go down. Dusk is a good time for me. I'm crepuscular.

Writing a book for me, I expect, is very similar to the experience of reading the book for my readers.

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.

With the Truman book, I wrote the entire account of his experiences in World War I before going over to Europe to follow his tracks in the war. When I got there, there was a certain satisfaction in finding I had it right - it does look like that.

In ordinary detective novels you never see the consequences of what happens in a story in the next book. That you do in mine.

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