Books Quotes

When I was a child I devoured every book I could get my hands on. I loved losing myself in colourful and dramatic stories - and my absolute favourite was 'Charlie And The Chocolate Factory.' Everything about it electrified me, and when I re-read Roald Dahl's books as an adult it surprised me.

I tend to turn down books originally published as e-books. As for selling books directly to e-book publishers, I would do so only if all traditional publishers had turned them down.

But I hang on to books. I love them. I even think they're very nice decor in a room - far better than paintings... That's not quite true!

I'm all for selling books, but when guys are burning my house down, that's where I draw the line.

I'm sure you're aware, with the time it takes to put these books together, everything can suddenly start coming out at once even though I wrote anything between one and five years ago.

Children simply don't make the distinction; a book is either good or bad. And some of the books they think are good are very, very bad indeed.

My books are water; those of the great geniuses are wine - everybody drinks water.

In my next life, I want to be tall and thin, parallel park and make good coffee. But for now, I have lots of stuff to work out in my life, but I'll have that until the day I die. I want to write more books.

Like any small business owner, I experienced the pressures of building a company from the ground up - developing a business plan, balancing the books, meeting payroll and building a customer base.

I think Americans like the practical; they like the human. And I like both those things myself, and I try and put them into my books.

I have assiduously avoided calling my books novels.

There have been more books alone written about Hamlet than have been written about the Bible.

Winning the Pulitzer is wonderful and it's an honor and I feel so humbled and so grateful, but I think that I'll think of it very much as the final sort of final moment for this book and put it behind me along with the rest of the book, as I write more books.

There are some friends you don't meet for twenty years and when you meet them again it's as if no twenty years has happened - you're lucky when that happens. I feel the same about books.

What a word is truth. Slippery, tricky, unreliable. I tried in these books to tell the truth.

Most of the books that I've written have been focused on, sort of, the individual, and sort of, either a voice, a personal voice, or a kind of transforming event where they step forward to fight for something they value.

People in my books tend to get their just deserts, even if not at the hands of the police.

Two more years were to go by before I knew anything about William Blake. Many years later, when his wife died, my godfather gave me the two books as a remembrance.

Books are humanity in print.

As an adolescent I wrote comic books, because I read lots of them, and fantasy novels set in Malaysia and Central Africa.

I was a total education geek. I loved school. I loved learning. I loved doing homework. All of my books and notebooks from high school are underlined and highlighted and there are notes all over the margins. And you know, I was a theater kid too. I was all over the place.

Always in my books, I like to throw that rogue element into a stable situation and then see what happens.

Comic books and The Chronicles of Narnia. My mother used to read those to me and my twin brother growing up.

Movies can't ruin books. They can only ruin movies.

Books should to one of these fours ends conduce, for wisdom, piety, delight, or use.

The fate of the singers who, like my songs, went up in flame was also the fate of the books which I later wrote. All of them went up in flame to Heaven in a fire which broke out one night at my home in Bad Homburg as I lay ill in a hospital.

I love everything that's old, - old friends, old times, old manners, old books, old wine.

In my subconscious, my books were part of a single emotional journey.

Generally my typical books have lots of twists and turns a big surprise ending and then usually another surprise at the end and ideally, as in Garden of Beasts, we get to the very end and we find at the last few pages that there's yet another surprise.

If God had meant Harvard professors to appear in People magazine, She wouldn't have invented The New York Review of Books.