Top 1200 Good Book Quotes & Sayings - Page 17

Since I was trying so hard to make books lead my life, I didn’t want to read them and then just put them back on the shelf and say, “good book,” as if I was patting a good dog. I wanted books to change me, and I wanted to write books that would change others.

The music is the emotional substance of the show; the book just sets it up. Nobody goes to a musical to hear the book. That's the way it works.

It's hard to read through a book on the principles of magic without glancing at the cover periodically to make sure it isn't a book on software design.

In fact, isn't it a joy - there is hardly a greater one - to find a new book, a living book, and to know that it will remain with you while life lasts?

I like the quiet it takes to pursue an idea the way I pursued 'Hamilton,' but I couldn't write a book, because there's no applause at the end of writing a book.

A good book or movie or screenplay should be emotionally satisfying. When they're done, you want people to breathe a deep sigh and say, 'Wow.'

I've tried to reduce profanity but I reduced so much profanity when writing the book that I'm afraid not much could come out. Perhaps we will have to consider it simply as a profane book and hope that the next book will be less profane or perhaps more sacred.

My quarrel with him is, that his works contain nothing worth quoting; and a book that furnishes no quotations, is me judice, no book,—it is a plaything.

As readers, we remain in the nursery stage so long as we cannot distinguish between taste and judgment, so long, that is, as the only possible verdicts we can pass on a book are two: this I like; this I don't like. For an adult reader, the possible verdicts are five: I can see this is good and I like it; I can see this is good but I don't like it; I can see this is good and, though at present I don't like it, I believe that with perseverance I shall come to like it; I can see that this is trash but I like it; I can see that this is trash and I don't like it.

Probably a good idea, let me know how it ends" "I already know how it ends" "You read the ending first?" "I always read the ending before I commit to the whole book." "If you know how it ends, why read the book?" "I don't read for the ending. I read for the story".

I like to remind teachers that even though they're all overwhelmed and overloaded, and it's easy to get burned out, it really is about the kids. It only takes one good teacher to change a life - one time, and one book. That's what happened when I was a kid. I had one good teacher that came in at the right time and turned me into a writer. So never lose sight - you could be that teacher.

Unfortunately, the author of a book pretty much gives up control of the story when the producers take over a book to make it into a movie.

With 'Free Agent Nation,' I was figuring out how to write a book along with writing the book. Now I think I've kind of, sort of figured out how to write a book a little bit better. But the process remains not that different - slow; laborious; tiny, incremental progress each day, punctuated by feelings of despair and self-loathing.

I did with my wife a comic book for the Raynham Hall Museum in Long Island. They sell the book every single time a busload of kids comes in.

The best morals kids get from any book is just the capacity to empathize with other people, to care about the characters and their feelings. So you don't have to write a preachy book to do that. You just have to make it a fun book with characters they care about, and they will become better people as a result.

We want a book to be a book. We'll have all the interactive bells and whistles but our intent is to engage young people in reading, not to show them a movie.

I grew up as a fan of the original Star Trek series. When I was in middle school, I think in the 6th grade, I remember going to a book fair and finding a book called The Making of Star Trek, by Stephen Whitfield, and I grabbed it and took and home and just devoured it, over and over again. It was a really influential book. It was very nuts and bolts.

A book no more contains reality than a clock contains time. A book may measure so-called reality as a clock measures so-called time; a book may create an illusion of reality as a clock creates an illusion of time; a book may be real, just as a clock is real (both more real, perhaps, than those ideas to which they allude); but let's not kid ourselves - all a clock contains is wheels and springs and all a book contains is sentences.

When I'm writing a book, I prefer not to speak about it, because only when the book is finished can I try to understand what I've really done and to compare my intentions with the result.

I watched so many comic book movies where the actors weren't as built as the characters in the book. It made me mad because they didn't look right.

Painting myself for others, I have painted my inward self with colors clearer than my original ones. I have no more made my book than my book has made me--a book consubstantial with its author, concerned with my own self, an integral part of my life; not concerned with some third-hand, extraneous purpose, like all other books.

I think that the economics of book publishing favor hits with long book runs. You make all your money on the last bunch of books, not the first.

Sarah Palin's book is big, 400 pages. She wrote the book herself and agonized over every word, and so will you.

In the middle of my fourth year teaching is when I got my book contract - in 2010. I knew the book would come out in May 2011.

All you do is to look / At a page in this book / Because that's where we always will be. / No book ever ends / When it's full of your friends / The Giraffe and the Pelly and me.

The book that first made me want to be a writer is Flannery O'Connor's short story collection 'A Good Man Is Hard To Find.'

Book love is something like romantic love. When we are reading a really great book, burdens feel lighter, cares seem smaller, and commonplaces are suddenly delightful. You become your best optimistic self. Like romantic love, book love fills you with a certain warmth and completeness. The world holds promise.

Every book I've written has been a different attempt to understand something, and the success or failure of the previous one is irrelevant. I write the book I want.

I've always wanted to have a book published - it was a dream of mine, but the thought of actually writing a book made me feel really sick.

It was very interesting [book Fast Food Nation] because all my friends who were in college, [and] this book became almost mandatory for them to read.

I love going to writers' colonies in pastoral settings where there's nothing to do, but either walk around or read a book or work on your book.

I just write the sort of book that I would enjoy reading myself, a book that is both scholarly and recreates the experience of people at that time.

Wormholes were first introduced to the public over a century ago in a book written by an Oxford mathematician. Perhaps realizing that adults might frown on the idea of multiply connected spaces, he wrote the book under a pseudonym and wrote it for children. His name was Charles Dodgson, his pseudonym was Lewis Carroll, and the book was Through The Looking Glass.

There's a book that's critical to understanding anxiety, a 17th-century book, 'The Anatomy of Melancholy,' by Robert Burton. I wanted to write something like that.

'The Brownies and the Goblins' is the only book I recall from my early childhood and is the inspiration for a children's book I wrote in the 1980s titled 'The Magic Spectacles.'

I frankly couldn't imagine being a series mystery-fiction writer, churning out book after book about the same viewpoint character.

I think having a good agent is key. I've been with mine for ten years now, and she's very honest with me. There are a lot of times I've sent her books that were not so good because I was tired of writing, or panicked about money, and she's told me flat out, "You don't want this to be your next book. Trust me."

Write what you want to read. So many people think they need to write a particular kind of book, or imitate a successful style, in order to be published. I've known people who felt they had to model their book on existing blockbusters, or write in a genre that's supposed to be "hot right now" in order to get agents and publishers interested. But if you're writing in a genre you don't like, or modeling yourself on a book you don't respect, it'll show through. You're your first, most important reader, so write the book that reader really wants to read.

I want to know one thing, the way to heaven; how to land safe on that happy shore. God Himself has condescended to teach the way; for this end He came from heaven. He hath written it down in a book. Give me that book! At any price give me the Book of God!

When we talk about good books, we often talk about good sentences, but what we rarely talk about is reader pleasure. Yet it is reader pleasure that is going to make a book break out into the kind of success that makes it into a household name.

In 2008, when I wrote Book 1 and Book 2, the head of the publishing house suggested twelve books - one each month. For practical reasons, that didn't work out.

Every reader, I suspect, has a book like this somewhere in his or her past, a book that seemed to hold within it, at that moment, all the mysteries of the universe.

'The Handmaid's Tale' breaks my heart. It's a show based on the book written in the '80s by Margaret Atwood - who is a spectacular talent. That book is a work of art.

Once we know the plot and its surprises, we can appreciate a book's artistry without the usual confusion and sap flow of emotion, content to follow the action with tenderness and interest, all passion spent. Rather than surrender to the story or the characters - as a good first reader ought - we can now look at how the book works, and instead of swooning over it like a besotted lover begin to appreciate its intricacy and craftmanship. Surprisingly, such dissection doesn't murder the experience. Just the opposite: Only then does a work of art fully live.

If Carlos and I were books, he'd be a Nietzsche book, and I'd be a Hubert Selby book - totally different mindsets. But musically, it all fell right into place.

I had been working on a second book with [David] Petraeus called Relentless. Obviously that book and the income that it would have generated went away.

You have tremendous freedom in the young adult book world to write what you want. You can put R-rated content in a book that you can't in a similarly targeted movie.

Of his new book, Don says: “It might be the greatest book ever written. I don’t think anybody is going to read a book again after they read my new one. I think God is proud of me. I am going to make a killing off this thing and I’m going to use the money to go to space.

With the success of 'Black Privilege,' of course, the book publishers wanted me to come with another book immediately. They came with the check, but I don't do things for money.

I have finished To Kill a Mockingbird. It is now my favorite book of all time, but then again, I always think that until I read another book.

People say that this new generation is so used to the Internet that their heads are already different. They can't read a book from beginning to end. That is not a tragedy. The book changes form.

There are some things fundamentally off about the stance of the book. And maybe that's okay; maybe every book is flawed, and great books, as flawed as they might be, articulate a moral argument that the reader then carries forward. The critique to this model is, of course, to ask: Should a book be ever so perfect that you come out of it with complete moral agreement that can be sustained?

To me a good book is like a quiet friend—a friend who’s happy to share thoughts and feelings with you, who’s always there when you need them. Best of all, this friend doesn’t have any secrets. They trust you to understand them. They take you to their innermost places. They share their sensations and emotions—and they let you experience them. Wherever you go and however you feel, they are always by your side. For an hour, a day, a week, or forever, their life becomes yours. Their story is your story. That’s the kind of book I’m trying to write.

Another thing I need to do, when I'm near the end of the book, is sleep in the same room with it...Somehow the book doesn't leave you when you're asleep right next to it.

'Pnin' by Vladimir Nabokov, which is a literally small book, fit right in my common law book. I would sit in class and read it.

Every book you pick up has its own lesson or lessons, and quite often the bad books have more to teach than the good ones.

I'm quite intrigued by the notion of a book that is completely self-contained but related to another book. I've coined a rather hideous word for it - a paraquel.

I definitely feel like when I write a book it's not my job to police or guide the readers. The book and the characters don't belong to me anymore. If that makes sense.

You need a community to succeed. In the back of every book is an acknowledgments page full of all the people it took to get that writer to the book you're holding.

Chrysostom, I remember, mentions a twofold book of God: the book of the creatures, and the book of the scriptures. God, having taught us first of all by his works, did it afterwards, by his Words. We will now for a while read the former of these books; 'twill help us in reading the latter. They will admirably assist one another.