Book Quotes

500+ Sourced quotes

When I was crossing into Gaza, I was asked at the checkpost whether I was carrying any weapons. I replied: Oh yes, my prayer books.

If the fires of freedom and civil liberties burn low in other lands they must be made brighter in our own. If in other lands the press and books and literature of all kinds are censored we must redouble our efforts here to keep them free. If in other lands the eternal truths of the past are threatened by intolerance we must provide a safe place for their perpetuation.

Franklin D. Roosevelt

All good books have one thing in common — they are truer than if they had really happened.

Ernest Hemingway

The scientific organization and comprehensive exposition in accessible form of the Talmud has a twofold importance for us Jews. It is important in the first place that the high cultural values of the Talmud should not be lost to modern minds among the Jewish people nor to science, but should operate further as a living force. In the second place, The Talmud must be made an open book to the world, in order to cut the ground from under certain malevolent attacks, of anti-Semitic origin, which borrow countenance from the obscurity and inaccessibility of certain passages in the Talmud. To support this cultural work would thus mean an important achievement for the Jewish people.

Albert Einstein

I believe the first draft of a book — even a long one — should take no more than three months…Any longer and — for me, at least — the story begins to take on an odd foreign feel, like a dispatch from the Romanian Department of Public Affairs, or something broadcast on high-band shortwave duiring a period of severe sunspot activity.

I decided that my existence would be one of books and silence.

Carlos Ruiz Zafón

Where two people are writing the same book, each believes he gets all the worries and only half the royalties.

Agatha Christie

The Penguin books are splendid value for sixpence, so splendid that if other publishers had any sense they would combine against them and suppress them.

I think the author who influenced me the most as a writer was Richard Matheson. Books like I Am Legend were an inspiration to me.

Happy the people whose annals are blank in history-books!

You gave me Christopher Robin, and then You breathed new life in Pooh. Whatever of each has left my pen Goes homing back to you. My book is ready, and comes to greet The mother it longs to see — It would be my present to you, my sweet, If it weren't your gift to me.

In the dime stores and bus stations,
People talk of situations,
Read books, repeat quotations,
Draw conclusions on the wall.

People disagreeing everywhere you look makes you wanna stop and read a book.

An English writer telephoned me from London, asking questions. One was, 'What's your alma mater?' I told him, 'Books.

It is with the reading of books the same as with looking at pictures; one must, without doubt, without hesitations, with assurance, admire what is beautiful.

Vincent van Gogh

Where is there any book of the law so clear to each man as that written in his heart?

Which is him?" The grammar was faulty, maybe, but we could not know, then, that it would go in a book someday.

It is with nations as it is with individuals. A book of history is a book of sermons.

Arthur Conan Doyle

No days, perhaps, of all our childhood are ever so fully lived as those that we had regarded as not being lived at all: days spent wholly with a favourite book. Everything that seemed to fill them full for others we pushed aside, because it stood between us and the pleasures of the Gods.

A book is made better by good readers and clearer by good opponents.

Friedrich Nietzsche

That's one thing I like about Hollywood. The writer is there revealed in his ultimate corruption. He asks no praise, because his praise comes to him in the form of a salary check. In Hollywood the average writer is not young, not honest, not brave, and a bit overdressed. But he is darn good company, which book writers as a rule are not. He is better than what he writes. Most book writers are not as good.

Raymond Chandler

All writers are vain, selfish, and lazy, and at the very bottom of their motives lies a mystery. Writing a book is a horrible, exhausting struggle, like a long bout of some painful illness. One would never undertake such a thing if one were not driven by some demon whom one can neither resist nor understand.

To conclude therefore, let no man upon a weak conceit of sobriety or an ill-applied moderation think or maintain that a man can search too far, or be too well studied in the book of God's words, or in the book of God's work, divinity, or philosophy; but rather let men endeavor an endless progress or proficiency in both.

I hope no one who reads this book has been quite as miserable as Susan and Lucy were that night; but if you have been - if you've been up all night and cried till you have no more tears left in you - you will know that there comes in the end a sort of quietness. You feel as if nothing is ever going to happen again.

The colonists had no library at their disposal; but the engineer was a book which was always at hand, always open at the page which one wanted, a book which answered all their questions, and which they often consulted.