Famous Quotes & Sayings

Andrew Schneider

If you're going to be a healer, it's not enough to read books and learn allegorical stories. you need to get your feet wet, get some clinical experience under your belt.

Andre Dubus

Wanting to know absolutely what a story is about, and to be able to say it in a few sentences, is dangerous: it can lead us to wanting to possess a story as we possess a cup... A story can always break into pieces while it sits inside a book on a shelf; and, decades after we have read it even twenty times, it can open us up, by cut or caress, to a new truth.

Andre Dubus

But the writer who endures and keeps working will finally know that writing the book was something hard and glorious, for at the desk a writer must try to be free of prejudice, meanness of spirit, pettiness, and hatred; strive to be a better human being than the writer normally is, and to do this through concentration on a single word, and then another, and another. This is splendid work, as worthy and demanding as any, and the will and resilience to do it are good for the writer's soul.

Andre Dubus

Writers have to be careful not to confuse personal attention with the attention that's going towards the book.

Andre Breton

I insist on knowing the names, on being interested only in books left ajar, like doors; I will not go looking for keys.

Andre Gide

With each book you write you should lose the admirers you gained with the previous one.

Andre Gide

No encounter occured that day, and I was glad of it; I took out of my pocket a little Homer I had not opened since leaving Marseilles, reread three lines of the Odyssey, learned them by heart; then, finding sufficient sustenance in their rhythm and reveling in them at leisure, I closed the book and remained, trembling, more alive than I had thought possible, my mind numb with happiness.

Ann-Marie MacDonald

Afterwards, in bed with a book, the spell of television feels remote compared to the journey into the page. To be in a book. To slip into the crease where two pages meet, to live in the place where your eyes alight upon the words to ignite a world of smoke and peril, colour and serene delight. That is a journey no one can end with the change of a channel. Enduring magic.

Ann Rule

All of my books now come from readers' ideas.

Ann Rule

I want to warn potential victims. Many of them are women, and many of them are battered women. It's a cause for me. When I look back, though, so many of the books I've written are about wives who just couldn't get away.

Ann Rule

Have you ever heard the expression: Walk a mile in my shoes, and then judge me? And write your own books.

Ann Patchett

I think people become consumed with selling a book when they need to be consumed with writing it.

Ann Patchett

I love telling people what to read. It's my favorite thing in the world, to buy books and force books on people, take bad books away from people, give them better books.

Ann Patchett

I don't write for an audience, I don't think whether my book will sell, I don't sell it before I finish writing it.

Ann Patchett

Sometimes if there's a book you really want to read, you have to write it yourself.

Ann Patchett

I can't write the book I want to write, but I can and will write the book I am capable of writing.

Ann Patchett

I craft everything in the beginning. I know where the characters are going before I start writing the book.

Ann Patchett

reading is a private act, private even from the person who wrote the book. Once the novel is out there, the author is beside the point. The reader and the book have their own relationship now, and should be left alone to work things out for themselves.

Andy Williams

Youve got to live life to write a book about it.

Angel Haze

I love to listen to books on tape.

Ang Lee

I had to find my way of translating the excitement you get when you're reading comic books to the big screen.

Ang Lee

Kids don't even read comic books anymore. They've got more important things to do - like video games.

Anatole Broyard

The more I like a book, the more slowly I read. this spontaneous talking back to a book is one of the things that makes reading so valuable.

Anatole Broyard

The more I like a book, the more reluctant I am to turn the page. Lovers, even book lovers, tend to cling. No one-night stands or "reads" for them.

Anatole Broyard

We don't simply read books. We become them.

Anatole Broyard

A book is meant not only to be read, but to haunt you, to importune you like a lover or a parent, to be in your teeth like a piece of gristle.

Anatole Broyard

The moment a book is lent I begin to miss it.

Anatole Broyard

A bookcase is as good as a view, as much of a panorama as the sight of a city or a river. There are dawns and sunsets in books - storms and zephyrs.

Anatole Broyard

If a book is really good, it deserves to be read again, and if it's great, it should be read at least three times.

Anatoly Karpov

My studies with Botvinnik brought me immense benefit, particularly the homework assignments which forced me to refer to chess books and to work independently.

Anatole France

Never lend books, for no one ever returns them

Anatole France

I do not know any reading more easy, more fascinating, more delightful than a catalogue.

Anatole France

We have never heard the devil's side of the story, God wrote all the book.