Book Quotes

A book that is shut is but a block.

When I and the other young artists were working in comics, our work carried with it a particularly American slant. After all, we were Americans drawing and writing about things that touched us. As it turned out, the early work was, you might say, a comic book version of Jazz.

I deliberately wrote a poem in my last book where I was suggesting that there are other passions as great as or more important than the passion of sex.

It was more exciting to get that first book published, I think.

I'm trying to get in the habit of, you know, picking up a book and learning how to write my feelings down, not my feelings but my thoughts, about things, and hopefully I'll moving toward the writing and directing thing soon.

Lots of people can write a good first page but to sustain it, that's my litmus test. If I flip to the middle of the book and there's a piece of dialogue that's just outstanding, or a description, then I'll flip back to the first page and start it.

It felt like the first thing, but when I first started out, I got a job adapting a book by Russell Banks called 'Rule Of The Bone.' I didn't do a very good job. I didn't really know what I was doing in general, let alone how to adapt a book.

Wear the old coat and buy the new book.

The one thing you have to do if you write a book is put yourself in someone else's shoes. The reader's shoes. You've got to entertain them.

I grew up in a completely bookless household. It was my father's boast that he had never read a book from end to end.

I've always liked getting away with just a little bit of what you're not supposed to. Like my first book, Billy's Booger, got me in trouble with the principal's office.

The good parts of a book may be only something a writer is lucky enough to overhear or it may be the wreck of his whole damn life and one is as good as the other.

I don't remember ever having finished a book.

The book came after the fall of the Taliban, it says something about Afghan family life. Those kind of stories - what happens behind the scenes on a TV screen - are important.

You can learn a line from a win and a book from a defeat.

I decided he'd changed so much that a whole new book was required and that book actually I can say so was the first to say that the marriage was in trouble and the Prince didn't like at all and my book was being serialized in the Sunday Times over five weeks.

The script is the coloring book that you're given, and your job is to figure out how to color it in. And also when and where to color outside the lines.

Everyone has a book inside of them - but it doesn't do any good until you pry it out.

The vehemence with which certain critics have chosen not simply to criticize what I've written, but to challenge my writing this story at all, speaks of what the book is about: fear of disapproval.

Yeah, because I think it's more important just to inspire people to wake up one day and pick up a book and start feeling it out for themselves.

I am being frank about myself in this book. I tell of my first mistake on page 850.

Everyone's waiting for the seventh book, and looking at each other saying, 'Oh, I wonder will I be in the running?

If I read a book and it makes my whole body so cold no fire can ever warm me, I know that is poetry.

I think for anybody reading the book they're going to get an idea in their heads of all those characters, and I think that once that gets fixed, it's quite hard to shake.

When I do a novel, I don't really use the script, I use the book; when I did Apocalypse Now, I used Heart of Darkness. Novels usually have so much rich material.

What's funny about Jesus' Son is that I never even wrote that book, I just wrote it down. I would tell these stories and people would say, You should write these things down.

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.