Book Quotes - Page 624

I like the brighter, shinier, happier comic-book material on a personal level, but I also think the best stories are told where you just don't know from page to page or moment to moment when the sucker-punches are coming.

In the long run, the quality of your work is all that matters. That is your only resumé. Be professional. Make sure your editor or publisher can always reach you. Do what's asked of you if your conscience can bear it.

What occurs to people when they read Kurt [Vonnegut] is that things are much more up for grabs than they thought they were. The world is a slightly different place just because they read a damn book. Imagine that.

I would not read the proof of one of my books for any fair & reasonable sum whatever, if I could get out of it. The proof-reading on the P & Pauper cost me the last rags of my religion.

You don't know about me without you have read a book by the name of The Adventures of Tom Sawyer; but that ain't no matter. That book was made by Mr. Mark Twain, and he told the truth, mainly. There was things which he stretched, but mainly he told the truth. That is nothing. I never seen anybody but lied one time or another, without it was Aunt Polly, or the widow, or maybe Mary. Aunt Polly—Tom's Aunt Polly, she is—and Mary, and the Widow Douglas is all told about in that book, which is mostly a true book, with some stretchers, as I said before.

I should be sorry to think it was the publishers themselves they got up this entire little flutter to enable them to unload a book that was taking too much room in their cellars, but you can never tell what a publisher will do. I have been one myself.

There ain't anything that is so interesting to look at as a place that a book has talked about.

When I am king they shall not have bread and shelter only, but also teachings out of books, for a full belly is little worth where the mind is starved.

In the ancient city of London, on a certain autumn day in the second quarter of the sixteenth century, a boy was born to a poor family of the name of Canty, who did not want him.

It was in Warwick Castle that I came across the curious stranger whom I am going to talk about. He attracted me by three things: his candid simplicity, his marvelous familiarity with ancient armor, and the restfulness of his company--for he did all the talking.

I like a thin book because it will Steady a Table, a leather volume because it will Strop a Razor, and a heavy book because it can be Thrown at a Cat.

There ain't nothing more to write about and I'm rotten glad of it, because if I'd know'd what trouble it was to make a book, I wouldn't a tackled it.

More than two hundred death penalties are gone from the law books, but the [biblical] texts that authorised them remain.

This editor is a critic. He has pulled out his carving-knife and his tomahawk and is starting after a book which he is going to have for breakfast.

We get our morals from books. I didn't get mine from books, but I know that morals do come from books- theoretically at least.

I have no liking for novels or stories - none in the world; and so, whenever I read one - which is not oftener than once in two years, and even in these same cases I seldom read beyond the middle of the book - my distaste for the vehicle always taints my judgment of the literature itself, as a matter of course; and also of course makes my verdict valuless. Are you saying "You have written stories yourself." Quite true: but the fact that an Indian likes to scalp people is no evidence that he likes to be scalped.

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

I don't want no better book than what your face is.

When I take up one of Jane Austen's books ... I feel like a barkeep entering the kingdom of heaven. I know what his sensation would be and his private comments. He would not find the place to his taste, and he would probably say so.

The Bible is a wonderful book; you can prove anything you want with it.

Hero: Person in a book who does things which he can't and girl marries him for it.

A "classic" is a book that everybody praises but nobody has read

This is the year 1492. I am eighty-two years of age. The things I am going to tell you are things which I saw myself as a child and as a youth.

If books are not good company, where shall I find it?

Once you've put one of his [Henry James] books down, you simply can't pick it up again.