Famous Quotes & Sayings

Ian Rankin

No matter how many awards you've won or how many sales you've got, come the next book it's still a blank sheet of paper and you're still panicking like hell that you've got nothing new to say.

Ian Rankin

I'm often asked how I write books, but I don't think my approach is suitable for everyone. If I walked into a creative writing class, all I could say to them was 'I tend to make it up as I go along.' I'm not sure that's brilliant advice.

Ian Rankin

A lot of writers, especially crime writers, have an image that we think we're trying to keep up with. You've got to be seen as dark and slightly dangerous. But I'm not like that and I've realised that I don't need to put that on. People will buy the books whether they see a photo of you dressed in black or not.

Ian Rankin

I used to think that: whenever I heard that someone had taken 10 years to write a novel, I'd think it must be a big, serious book. Now I think, 'No - it took you one year to write, and nine years to sit around eating Kit Kats.

Iain Sinclair

It's just a freak of fate that I'm paid to write, not paying to print my own books - but I'd be doing it anyway: it's my life.

Iain Banks

I still have some of my old University essays, and I do still have my drawing book from primary year seven.

Iain Banks

As long as a film stays unmade, the book is entirely yours, it belongs to the writer. As soon as you make it into a film, suddenly more people see it than have ever read the book.

Iain Banks

I wouldn't like to be a character in one of my books!

Iain Banks

Hersesy is denying the word of God, and the word of God is much more reliably expressed in the natural world as it’s revealed through reason and science than in what I have heard described wonderfully as “the giant book of Jewish fairy stories

Iain Banks

Dead Air' is full of rants; it's a rant-based book. Yes, it's self-indulgence. I plead guilty; mea culpa.

Iain Banks

I don't really do themes. I might accidentally, but themes are an emergent phenomena of the writing of the book, of just trying to get a story out there.

Iain Banks

By the usual reckoning, the worst books make the best films.

Iain Banks

I enjoy it too much - even if I knew I'd never get a book published, I would still write. I enjoy the experience of getting thoughts and ideas and plots and characters organised into this narrative framework.

Hugh Walpole

A bibliomaniac is one to whom books are like bottles of whiskey to the inebriate, to whom anything that is between covers has an intoxicating savor.

Hugh Prather

Books seek us out. They slip themselves into our hands just at the time we are ready for a new self-concept.

Hugo Chavez

I love books. If they are good books, I love them even more. But even if they are bad books, I still love them.

Hugh Dancy

Whether it's from the books or the films, there are some people that will have a very fixed idea in their head. You're not going to match that. At a certain point, you have to accept that.

Hugh Dancy

Besides, most of the books I like involve people I could never play in a million years.

Hugh Grant

I cling to the fantasy that I could have done something more creative. Like actually writing a script, or writing a book. But the awful truth is that I... probably can't!

Huey Newton

White America has seen to it that Black history has been suppressed in schools and in American history books. The bravery of hundreds of our ancestors who took part in slave rebellions has been lost in the mists of time, since plantation owners did their best to prevent any written accounts of uprisings.

Howard Zinn

The mountain of history books under which we all stand leans so heavily in the other direction-so tremblingly respectful of states and statesmen and so disrespectful, by inattention, to people's movements-that we need some counterforce to avoid being crushed into submission.

Howard Zinn

That chain of relationships made me think of how connections are made--you read a book, you meet a person, you have a single experience, and your life is changed in some way. No act, therefore, however small, should be dismissed or ignored.

Howard Zinn

I had always insisted that a good education was a synthesis of book learning and involvement in social action, that each enriched the other. I wanted my students to know that the accumulation of knowledge, while fascinating in itself, is not sufficient as long as so many people in the world have no opportunity to experience that fascination.

Howard Nemerov

I never abandoned either forms or freedom. I imagine that most of what could be called free verse is in my first book. I got through that fairly early.

Howard Gardner

Til 1983, I wrote primarily for other psychologists and expected that they would be the principal audience for my book.

Howard Gardner

While I've worked on many topics and written many books, I have not abandoned my interest in multiple intelligences.

Howard Aiken

Theres my education in computers, right there; this is the whole thing, everything I took out of a book.

Hosea Ballou

It is better to be the builder of our own name than to be indebted by descent for the proudest gifts known to the books of heraldry.

Horace

Books have their destinies.

Guy Gavriel Kay

It can be hard to write a skillfully entertaining fiction, but a great book wants to be more, and wants more from us.

Guy Gavriel Kay

After a while, you start to realize that you should write a book you would want to read. I try to write a book I would enjoy.

Gough Whitlam

If I begin my book with a review of the coup, it is only to show that my abiding interests for Australia did not end with it. They shall end only with a long and fortunate life.

Gottfried Leibniz

I am convinced that the unwritten knowledge scattered among men of different callings surpasses in quantity and in importance anything we find in books, and that the greater part of our wealth has yet to be recorded.