Famous Quotes & Sayings

Alan Bennett

A book is a device to ignite the imagination.

Alan Bennett

The appeal of reading, she thought, lay in its indifference: there was something undeferring about literature. Books did not care who was reading them or whether one read them or not. All readers were equal, herself included. Literature, she thought, is a commonwealth; letters a republic.

Alan Bennett

What she was finding also was how one book led to another, doors kept opening wherever she turned and the days weren't long enough for the reading she wanted to do.

Alan Bennett

I don't talk very well. With writing, you've time to get it right. Also I've found the more I talk the less I write, and if I didn't write no one would want me to talk anyway.

Alan Bennett

Books are not about passing time. They're about other lives. Other worlds. Far from wanting time to pass, one just wishes one had more of it. If one wanted to pass the time one could go to New Zealand.

Alain Resnais

When I was twelve, the passage from silent film to the talkies had an impact on me-I still watch silent films. I don't think that there is any such thing as an old film; you don't say, 'I read an old book by Flaubert,' or 'I saw an old play by Moliere.'

Alan Arkin

No matter how much time you spend reading books or following your intuition, you're gonna screw it up. Fifty times. You can't do parenting right.

Alan Ball

Television viewing has become for me a completely different experience, because I don't watch shows on a weekly basis. I wait until the DVD or I TiVo everything and wait until the end of a season and watch it all over a weekend. For me that's a really satisfying experience, like reading a book.

Alan Ball

I'm aware of 'Twilight,' but I've never seen the movies or read any of the books. Frankly, the story leaves me cold - why do a vampire story about abstinence?

Al Seckel

I have to admit that I am really partial to the look and feel of a book. I have been that way my entire life.

Al Pacino

You'll never be alone if you’ve got a book.

Al Leiter

Pitches are like pages of a book; they're so important. The chess game; how I set you up early, and how I'll do it differently later.

Akhil Sharma

Exposition suggests a great trust in the reader, and this expression of trust makes a book feel tender.

Akira Kurosawa

Of all my films, people wrote to me most about this one... ...I had wanted to make The Idiot long before Rashomon. Since I was little I've liked Russian literature, but I find that I like Dostoevsky the best and had long thought that this book would make a wonderful film. He is still my favourite author, and he is the one - I still think - who writes most honestly about human existence.

Aiden Wilson Tozer

The best book is not one that informs merely, but one that stirs the reader up to inform himself.

Aiden Wilson Tozer

If you want to be changed, read a good book.

Aiden Wilson Tozer

I did not go through the Book. The Book went through me.

Aiden Wilson Tozer

The Bible is a supernatural book and can be understood only by supernatural aid.

Chris Colfer

Right now, we're living in an ugly chapter of our lives, but books always get better!

Chris Adrian

It takes four angels to oversee an apocalypse: a recorder to make the book that would be scripture in the new world; a preserver to comfort and save those selected to be the first generation; an accuser to remind them why they suffer; and a destroyer to revoke the promise of survival and redemption, and to teach them the awful truth about furious sheltering grace.

Chris Abani

I think that most writers who are trying to write important and difficult books are in many ways putting their own humanity into question. Sometimes the journey is finding out where you stand in relationship to your own humanity and to the humanity of others.

Chris Abani

My books are often shelved around those of Chinua Achebe and Margaret Atwood, or Chimamanda Adichie and Monica Ali. All of this depends, of course, on the bookstore and how conversant the shelf stocker is with the alphabet.

Chris Abani

I think a book that is over 400 pages should be split in two. I don't know that there's anything that interesting that can go on for 700 pages. I think that is a little bit indulgent.

Chris Abani

Fiction is risky for writers also in that the process of making certain books, of shaping certain narratives, leaves scars and marks on your inner life.

Chip Kidd

I often get asked, 'Is the book dead?' It hasn't happened yet. It's different than music. Music was always meant to be pure sound - it started out as pure sound and now it's pure sound again. But books started out as things. Words on paper began as words on paper. The paperback book is the best technology to deliver that information to you.

Chip Kidd

I think too many comic book covers are way too busy, crammed with far too much information, both visual and verbal, that just becomes a dull noise.

Chip Kidd

I still have a steady stream of book cover work. I'm grateful for it. Viva le book!

Chip Kidd

A book cover is a distillation. It is a haiku of the story.

Chiwetel Ejiofor

Steve MCQueen created an entire family to tell one man's tale and I am delighted that so many of this family have also been recognised today. I am hugely grateful to the Academy for this great honour, and, of course, to Solomon Northup for sharing his story through his breathtaking book.

Chinua Achebe

If you ask me, Now, is it your best book? I would say, I don't really know. I wouldn't even want to say. And I'd even go on and say, I don't even think so.

Chinua Achebe

Each of my books is different. Deliberately... I wanted to create my society, my people, in their fullness.

Chinua Achebe

The story of this man who had killed a messenger and hanged himself would make interesting reading. One could almost write a whole chapter on him. Perhaps not a whole chapter but a resonable paragraph, at any rate. There was so much else to include, and one must be firm in cutting out details. He had already chosen the title of the book, after much thought: `The Pacification of the Primitive Tribes of the Lower Niger.'

China Mieville

Kraken' is a very undisciplined book. That's a gamble. If it doesn't come off, it's disastrous. But there are pleasures, I think, to a meandering lack of discipline that you can't get the other way, and vice versa.