Booked Quotes (page 21)
Reading alters the appearance of a book. Once it has been read, it never looks the same again, and people leave their individual imprint on a book they have read. Once of the pleasures of reading is seeing this alteration on the pages, and the way, by reading it, you have made the book yours.
Paul Theroux
Lovely and unremarkable, the clutterof mugs and books, the almost-empty FigNewtons box, thick dishes in a bigtin tray, the knife still standing in the butter, change like the color of river waterin the delicate shift to day. Thin fogveils the hedges, where a neighbor dogmakes rounds. 'Go to bed. It doesn't matterabout the washing-up. Take this book along.'Whatever it was we said that night is gone, framed like a photograph nobody took. Stretched out on a camp cot with the book, I think that...
Marilyn Hacker
I Need a Good Book I need a good story. I need a good book. The kind that explodes. Off the shelf. I need some good writing, Alive and exciting, To contemplate all by myself. I need a good novel, I need a good read. I probably need. Two or three. I need a good tale. Of love and betrayal. Or perhaps an adventure at sea. I need a good saga. I need a good yarn. A momentous and mightily. Or slight one. But with thousands and thousands. And thousands of books, I need someone to tell me. The right...
John Lithgow
Reading a book should be a conversation between you and the author. Presumably he knows more about the subject than you do; if not, you probably should not be bothering with his book. But understanding is a two-way operation; the learner has to question himself and question the teacher, once he understands what the teacher is saying. Marking a book is literally an expression of your differences or your agreements with the author. It is the highest respect you can pay him.
Mortimer Adler
Each book is a new book. I’ve never written it before and I have to teach myself how to write it as I go along. The fact that I’ve written books in the past seems to play no part in it. I always feel like a beginner and I’m continually running into the same difficulties, the same blocks, the same despairs. You make so many mistakes as a writer, cross out so many bad sentences and ideas, discard so many worthless pages, that finally what you learn is how stupid you are. It’s a humbling...
Paul Auster
he fact people think that when you sell a lot of books you are not a serious writer is a great insult to the readership. I get a little angry when people try to say such a thing. There was a review of my last book in one American paper by a professor of Latin American studies and he attacked me personally for the sole reason that I sold a lot of books. That is unforgivable.
Isabel Allende
I am a buyer of blank books. Kids find it interesting that I would buy a blank book. They say, "Twenty-Six dollars for a blank book! Why would you pay that?" The reason I pay twenty-six dollars is to challenge myself to find something worth twenty-six dollars to put in there. All my journals are private, but if you ever got hold of one of them, you wouldn't have to look very far to discover it is worth more than twenty-six dollars
Jim Rohn
I admire Tolkien greatly. His books had enormous influence on me. And the trope that he sort of established—the idea of the Dark Lord and his Evil Minions—in the hands of lesser writers over the years and decades has not served the genre well. It has been beaten to death. The battle of good and evil is a great subject for any book and certainly for a fantasy book, but I think ultimately the battle between good and evil is weighed within the individual human heart and not necessarily between...
George R. R. Martin