Book Quotes - Page 305

Forever, reading has been central, the necessary fix, the support system. Her life has been informed by reading. She has read not just for distraction, sustenance, to pass the time, but she has read in a state of primal innocence, reading for enlightenment, for instruction, even. ... She is as much a product of what she has read as of the way in which she has lived; she is like millions of others built by books, for whom books are an essential foodstuff, who could starve without.

A good book is the precious life-blood of a master-spirit, embalmed and treasured up on purpose to a life beyond life, and as such it must surely be a necessary commodity.

Add to this cruelly delicate organism the overpowering necessity to create, create, create - so that without the creating of music or poetry or books or buildings or something of meaning, his very breath is cut off from him. He must create, must pour out creation. By some strange, unknown, inward urgency he is not really alive unless he is creating.

I am an inveterate homemaker, it is at once my pleasure, my recreation, and my handicap. Were I a man, my books would have been written in leisure, protected by a wife and a secretary and various household officials. As it is, being a woman, my work has had to be done between bouts of homemaking.

I don't read magazines much, and I have an awful time with books.

I think we are afraid of each other when it comes to sex, because we read so much about sex, we talk so openly about sex, we see movies and we read books; but when we are face to face with someone else, we forget our individual patterns; that we are unique. So we try to repeat other people's patterns, according to what we seen and what we heard. So most of us are very frustrated, because we don't accept our individuality as far as sex is concerned.

I have been told that beauty is the great seducer of men.

There must be a language that doesn't depend on words.

Up until then, whenever anyone had mentioned the possibility of making a film adaptation, my answer had always been, ‘No, I’m not interested.’ I believe that each reader creates his own film inside his head, gives faces to the characters, constructs every scene, hears the voices, smells the smells. And that is why, whenever a reader goes to see a film based on a novel that he likes, he leaves feeling disappointed, saying: ‘the book is so much better than the film.

People say strange things, the boy thought. Sometimes it's better to be with the sheep, who don't say anything. And better still to be alone with one's books. They tell their incredible stories at the time when you want to hear them. But when you're talking to people, they say some things that are so strange that you don't know how to continue the conversation.

Eat when it's time to eat. And move along when it's time to move along.

Books are not about messages. I write to understand my soul

We buy books, we go to gyms, we expend a lot of brain power on trying to hold back time, when we should be celebrating the miracle of being here in this world.

There is a book called San Francisco Tape Music Centre:1960s Counterculture and the Avant-Garde and this book describes everything that you want to know or don't want to know about it, with a lot of documentation.

A book might be written on the injustice of the just.

I'm very lucky. I'm very fortunate that my books have never gone out of print - none of them

You are holding in your hands not only a book of readings and instruction for the journey, but one monastic's heart of love held out to a searching world.

You could sing us the phone book and we would still love you.

A book is worth a few francs; we Germans can afford to destroy those. We all may not appreciate artistic merit, but cash value is another matter.

I teach a course in screenwriting at Columbia, but I've never taken a course and I've never read a book about it!

This is perhaps the most profound meaning of the book of Job, the best example of wisdom.

If children are studying the 20th century, I'm in their text books.

The most terrifying thing I can think of is being alone - and I mean utterly alone, like no one else in the world alone - at night. That's the nucleus of the first story in my collection and it's also where the title came from for the book.

Because I'm such a creative person, and I've always got my nose in a book, I suppose it was only a matter of time before non-fiction turned into fiction again. But I never consciously set out to become a writer and I never thought I'd be doing the things I'm doing today.

The most important sentence in a good book is the first one; it will contain the organic seed from which all that follows will grow.