Quotes on Book

Our life is a book that writes itself and whose principal themes sometimes escape us. We are like characters in a novel who do not always understand what the author wants of them.

With every book, you go back to school. You become a student. You become an investigative reporter. You spend a little time learning what it's like to live in someone else's shoes.

In my whole life, I have known no wise people (over a broad subject matter area) who didn't read all the time - none, zero. You'd be amazed at how much Warren reads - at how much I read. My children laugh at me. They think I'm a book with a couple of legs sticking out.

If I get stuck, I look at a book that tells me how someone else did it. I turn the pages, and then I say, 'Oh, I forgot that bit,' then close the book and carry on. Finally, after you've figured out how to do it, you read how they did it and find out how dumb your solution is and how much more clever and efficient theirs is!

The first chapter sells the book; the last chapter sells the next book.

What had been (at the beginning) no bigger than a full stop had expanded into a comma, a word, a sentence, a paragraph, a chapter; now it was bursting into more complex developments, becoming, one might say, a book - perhaps an encylopaedia - even a whole language.

The last thing one discovers in composing a work is what to put first.

Books are masters who instruct us without rods or ferules, without words or anger, without bread or money. _x000D_ If you approach them, they are not asleep; If you seek them, they do not hide; _x000D_ If you blunder, they do not scold; if you are ignorant, they do not laugh at you.

If you truly love film, I think the healthiest thing to do is not read books on the subject. I prefer the glossy film magazines with their big color photos and gossip columns, or the National Enquirer. Such vulgarity is healthy and safe.

Why is it so difficult to assemble those things that really matter in life and to dwell among them only? I am referring to certain landscapes, persons, beasts, books, rooms, meteorological conditions, fruits.

THE WRITER can get free of his writing only by using it, that is, by reading oneself. As if the aim of writing were to use what is already written as a launching pad for reading the writing to come. Moreover, what he has written is read in the process, hence constantly modified by his reading. The book is an unbearable totality. I write against a background of facets.

Reading a book is like re-writing it for yourself.

He who repeats what he does not understand is no better than an ass that is loaded with books.

What I really mean is that a great book should leave you with many experiences, and slightly exhausted at the end. You live several lives while reading it.

When we are young, we spend much time and pains in filling our note-books with all definitions of Religion, Love, Poetry, Politics, Art, in the hope that, in the course of a few years, we shall have condensed into our encyclopaedia the net value of all the theories at which the world has yet arrived. But year after year our tables get no completeness, and at last we discover that our curve is a parabola, whose arcs will never meet.

Whether the author intended a symbolic resonance to exist in her book is irrelevant. All that matters is whether it's there. Because the book does not exist for the benefit of the author, the book exists for the benefit of YOU. If we as readers can have a bigger and richer experience with the world as a result of reading a symbol and that symbol wasn't intended by the author, WE STILL WIN.

If somebody takes the time, a: to read a book that I have written, and then to b: care about it enough to write me and ask questions, surely I owe them a response.

We have never been so rich in books. But there has never been a generation when there is so much twaddle in print for children.

When I write, I'm still imagining a kid reading it on paper. I read e-books when I travel, but in general I still prefer holding an old-fashioned book in my hands. There's a special, tactile experience.

There is a big difference between wanting to say you wrote a book, and actually writing one. Many people think they want to write, even though they find crafting sentences and paragraphs unpleasant. They hope there is a way to write without writing. I can tell you with certainty there isn’t one.

We might remind ourselves that criticism is as inevitable as breathing, and that we should be none the worse for articulating what passes in our minds when we read a book and feel an emotion about it, for criticizing our own minds in their work of criticism.