Famous Quotes & Sayings

Michael Francis

Would I expect anything different from the Bush administration? No. They will cook the books for whatever they want.

Joanne Harris

Writing books and being paid for it - it's not like winning the Lottery. You can't suddenly go, 'Yippee!' and start throwing tenners in the air. I've done pretty well out of it, but certainly not enough to say, 'Right, that's me set up for life.'

Whitley Strieber

To make a long story short: the way I work out my fears is in the fiction. The results of that work go into the books of fact.

To limit the press is to insult a nation ; to prohibit reading of certain books is to declare the inhabitants to be either fools or slaves

Yeah, that's good. I don't want to go down in the history books for that. I want to be the first guy to lose 19 and come back and win 19.

We need to write books that publicists and marketers and booksellers and book club leaders and librarians and readers can get excited about. That have something about them that makes them stand out. That makes them shine.

Helen Fielding

I've had a lot of books rejected in my time. My first novel, which didn't get published, was, with hindsight, crashingly dull.

Hans Jonas

To me, it was a sad fate to have been born into a period and a world where everything was in tip-top order, and the only real excitement was to be found in history books and occasionally also in the paper.

Not as ours the books of old - Things that steam can stamp and fold; Not as ours the books of yore - Rows of type, and nothing more.

Greg Graffin

I got interested in palaeontology and vertebrate history - sparked by books on human evolution - then vertebrate evolution. Studying with palaeontologists kindled my interest in fieldwork.

Orhan Pamuk

If I think back on the books to which I have devoted my entire life, I am most surprised by those moments when I have felt as if the sentences, dreams, and pages that have made me so ecstatically happy have not come from my own imagination - that another power has found them and generously presented them to me.

We have a lot of books so this will be a new element that should be exciting.

I write everywhere. I've written books while I was on planes, at Disney World, and in multiple countries of which I am not a native. It can be a struggle to make word count sometimes, but I will persevere!

I was that kid with the glasses and the hungry expression who haunted every library book sale and used bookstore in town: the one who always has a book in one hand and is reaching for the next book with the other. There's one in every town.

Roddy Doyle

Ulysses could have done with a good editor. You know people are always putting Ulysses in the top 10 books ever written but I doubt that any of those people were really moved by it.

Orhan Pamuk

The fictive structure, my work, my imagination, my books are about the details, the huge construction about culture, Islamic culture or modern Turkey. They're all intertwined.

There's a bunch of Stephen King books I love. 'Salem's Lot' was always one of my favourites. 'It.' 'Needful Things.' Moving away from King, and 'Silence of the Lambs' is always a good choice.

Patricia MacLachlan

My inspiration for writing is all the wonderful books that I read as a child and that I still read. I think that for those of us who write, when we find a wonderful book written by someone else, we don't really get jealous, we get inspired, and that's kind of the mark of what a good writer is.

Patrick Ness

I get tired of comedies where there are a bunch of funny guys and a beautiful woman who doesn't do anything funny. And I don't like books where there's a rough-and-tumble boy and a really clever, snotty girl. That's just not my experience with teenagers.

My son craves picture books about Transformers and Ninja Turtles and the Hulk; they show one fantastic creature smashing or zapping another into smithereens on page after page. They are dull and ugly and show no interesting stories or models of conflict resolution or character building.

Pico Iyer

Alas, those six unfortunate souls who have made their way through my books know that every one of them is about Emerson and Thoreau and their dark counters, Melville and Emily Dickinson. Try as I might, I can't get their inspirations, their challenges and sentences and wisdom and questions out of my head.

Patrick Stewart

There are several books that I have-the Physics of Star Trek, Star Trek and Business, there are manuals on command style and countless scholarly papers that have been written about the significance of Next Generation.

Patti Smith

We have such a great depth of human history in all of the arts, whether it's opera or mathematics or painting or classical music or jazz. There's so many things to study, new books to read, and certainly always ways to transform old ideas and to come up with new ones.

Ricky Jay

Sitting with a deck of cards in your hand all day is an obsession. Visiting print shops and bookstores and libraries is an obsession. And writing about this is an obsession. I think, in general, most collectors are obsessed. I think the only form of a rationalized greed is when you're collecting something you are supposedly serious about.

Richard Russo

About 15 years ago I went though a period of a year or so when I just couldn't find anything good. My wife noticed I was having trouble reading menus. I bought some cheap reading glasses in a drug store. I got home and suddenly all these books that weren't good were good.

We were having so much trouble getting the cars feeling the same, I started questioning the work the guys were doing if they were cutting corners or setting them up right. I questioned what was going on with the weight, and we got to looking in the books and saw it got away from us.

We were slammed when we went to do pick-ups. It took two days (as opposed to one in previous years), and people have been dropping off books ever since. The hallways of our offices are literally choked with (boxes of ) books.

We had to struggle to find crimes in the books that fit the conduct here.

We're up there (in the ranks of weird spots and stories). Of all the books I've written, this one was the easiest. I could have written four times as much.

Philip Reeve

I had no idea I'd end up writing four books when I completed 'Mortal Engines.' I didn't even think it would find a publisher.

Octavia Butler

While Fledging is a different type of book, The Parable series serve as cautionary tales. I wrote the Parable books because of the direction of the country. You can call it save the world fiction, but it clearly doesn't save anything.

P. C. Cast

With a young-adult series, you need to get a lot of books out on the market quickly. Teenagers aren't going to wait years and years for the next book.

P. C. Cast

Kids definitely go into bookstores after reading 'Twilight' and want something else like it.