Books Quotes

My books are character-driven. They're not driven by the story.

With a few flowers in my garden, half a dozen pictures and some books, I live without envy.

We're kidding on that. One of the things I insisted upon when we went into this project was that we are full partners, going fifty-fifty, both on the money and on the say of what's going on with the books.

Blake has always been a favorite, the lyrics, not so much the prophetic books, but I suppose Yeats influenced me more as a young poet, and the American, Robert Frost.

Ideas are only lethal if you suppress and don't discuss them. Ignorance is not bliss, it's stupid. Banning books shows you don't trust your kids to think and you don't trust yourself to be able to talk to them.

In the last 1,000 years, the Arabs have translated as many books as Spain translates in just one year.

Life isn't so complicated for children. They have more time to think about the really important things. That's why I occasionally moralise in my children's books in a way I wouldn't dare when writing for adults.

Obviously people read the books in order to be entertained.

Books are funny little portable pieces of thought.

The Twist was a guided missile launched from the ghetto into the heart of suburbia. The Twist succeeded, as politics, religion and law could never do, in writing in the heart and soul what the Supreme Court could only write on the books.

A single conversation across the table with a wise man is better than ten years mere study of books.

Wherever they burn books they will also, in the end, burn human beings.

A book is a fragile creature, it suffers the wear of time, it fears rodents, the elements and clumsy hands. so the librarian protects the books not only against mankind but also against nature and devotes his life to this war with the forces of oblivion.

Surely the immutable laws of the universe can teach more impressive and exalted lessons than the holy books of all the religions on earth.

I never heard of anyone who was really literate or who ever really loved books who wanted to suppress any of them.

One sheds one's sicknesses in books - repeats and presents again one's emotions, to be master of them.

I loved to read and to write, but then something happened. As I made my way through school, I kept getting handed books to read that didn't excite me and didn't even remotely connect to the realities of my life.

I enjoy adapting my own work, or anybody's work. I like to adapt books.

He who studies medicine without books sails an uncharted sea, but he who studies medicine without patients does not go to sea at all.

I read over a hundred books a year and have done so since I was fifteen years old, and every book I've read has taught me something.

People don't see this side of me. They don't know I read, like, 800 million spiritual books. Lately I am just really getting into a lot of spirituality.

The best books come from someplace inside. You don't write because you want to, but because you have to.

Actually, the books were never a planned career path.

I often reread books I have written.

Children's books are often seen as the poor relation of literature. But children are just as demanding as adult readers, if not more so. I should know. I'm a children's writer myself.

The oldest books are only just out to those who have not read them.

I'd always liked to read, but when I picked up books I wasn't getting the same kind of excitement from them that I was from going out clubbing. I wanted to get the same kind of feel.

My first collection of poems was published by Bloodaxe Books, which was then a very new imprint.

I was drawn to boxing because I got beat up as a kid. I was the kid with the piano books in a New York neighbourhood.

At each of these northern posts there were interesting experiences in store for me, as one who had read all the books of northern travel and dreamed for half a lifetime of the north; and that was - almost daily meeting with famous men.