Book Quotes

In a typical history book, black Americans are mentioned in the context of slavery or civil rights. There's so much more to the story.

~ Kareem Abdul-Jabbar

When 'Midnight's Children' came out, people in the West tended to respond to the fantasy elements in the novel, to praise it in those terms. In India, people read it like a history book.

~ Salman Rushdie

With each new book, the march of our national history takes a step forward. When one is present at a book launch, one is bearing witness to the birth of a new body of ideas, to the coming into being of another testimony of history.

~ Ibrahim Babangida

I don't think with any book you get used to people falling in love with the story. It's been incredible just to realize your books are being read. It's a pretty amazing feeling.

~ Jennifer Armentrout

'Amazing Grace' is not a book of interviews or onetime snapshots. It's a memoir of a journey that took me into a place I had never been and took over two years of my life. I don't think the people in this book would have said the things to me that they did if they perceived me as a reporter.

~ Jonathan Kozol

Every time I got 'Amazing Spider-Man' or 'Fantastic Four' or another book firmly on the rails, we got pulled into some big event book or crossover and it cost momentum and messed badly with the pacing and structure of the book.

~ J. Michael Straczynski

You could easily do a book of Marshawn Lynch's quotes, which have a quite serious political pushback. I think he's really amazing.

~ David Shields

When 'Catch Me If You Can' was published back in 1980, I never dreamed that it would become a bestseller, much less a major motion picture and now a big Broadway musical. What's amazing about the book is that it has never gone out of print.

~ Frank Abagnale

I went on a book tour immediately after 9/11. I was due to leave the following Wednesday, so I just did. It was an amazing thing, because planes hadn't been flying very many days, and I got on this plane and went to San Francisco, and the minute that plane lifted above the clouds, I felt this incredible sense of lightness.

~ Joan Didion

When I first started dating my husband, I had this weird fascination with the circus and clowns and old carnival things and sideshow freaks and all that. About a month after we started dating, he bought me this amazing black-and-white photo book on the circus in the 1930s, and I started sobbing.

~ Christina Hendricks

President Clinton signed a $10 million deal to write a book by 2003. Isn't that amazing? Yes, and get this, not only that, President Bush signed a $10 million deal to read a book by 2003.

~ Conan O'brien

I just love comic books. I've always loved comic book art, and I just think it's amazing.

~ Zayn Malik

Well just meeting J. K. Rowling was amazing because she created all this world. And all the fans, we all get so obsessed with it and then you met the one person who made it all up. It was just so amazing. And I was just so amazed that that she wrote this book and all of the films have happened.

~ Evanna Lynch

The English Bible - a book which, if everything else in our language should perish, would alone suffice to show the whole extent of its beauty and power.

~ Thomas Babington Macaulay

There's only one test of a great children's book, or a great children's film, and that is this: If it can be read or viewed with pleasure by adults, then it has the chance to be a great children's film, or a great children's book.

~ Chuck Jones

'The Slap' is not like anything else. It's an incredibly well-written novel that has been turned into a great and intriguing series that reveals both less and more about each character than you learn in the book. It's a novel that has been given a second chance to live.

~ Essie Davis

When I was first diagnosed, I went out, as a book person, and got some books on cancer and looked up my version of the disease. It said that I had about a 5 percent chance of survival. I said, 'Gosh, well, it's been a good run.' What I didn't realize is that in the two years since those books were published, things had shifted dramatically.

~ Molly Ivins

I don't read 'chick lit,' fantasy or science fiction but I'll give any book a chance if it's lying there and I've got half an hour to kill.

~ J.k. Rowling

If I get a chance to write a comic book or do a voice in an Adult Swim show, I do it. It's much more fulfilling to me and I get to work with people who I'm a fan of.

~ Bill Hader

I don't pick up my work at all. If it's something that's still in progress and I have the chance to make some edits on the material or think about the order, little things like that, I'll keep those stories at hand and go through them. But once it exists as the book, it's locked away in a vault, and I kind of put it behind me.

~ Adrian Tomine

I love real books, paper books, but I also love buying online, and I think that people are more willing to take a chance to read something if it's cheaper - sometimes books on the Kindle are $6. A hardback book is $25. For $25, it better be a really great book. Or you're going to be mad.

~ Caroline Leavitt

We determine whether a book is for boys or girls long before the reader gets a chance to decide: we package them with soldiers and ballet slippers on their covers, war machines and glittering gowns.

~ Marie Lu

I am a big defender of 'Harry Potter,' and I think any book that gets kids to read are books that we should cherish, we should be thankful for them.

~ Judy Blume

If you sell the film rights to your book, it doesn't mean there will be a film. I have sold the rights to five books and had zero films made. Take the money and be thankful.

~ Matt Haig

I am glad and thankful that my husband forced me to start reading for pleasure, as it took me years to listen to him and pick up a book!

~ Rachel Tucker

Sometimes street knowledge can be as important as book knowledge.

~ Vikas Swarup

For years I've wanted to write about the Australian countryside, but, like most Australians, I've only got a tourist's knowledge of it. I thought that if I disobeyed that basic rule of writing - write about what you know - I'd write a thin and inauthentic book.

~ Kate Grenville

Don't buy furs: that's No. 1. You can start with that. Then spay and neuter your pets. We destroy millions of them a year. Go to an animal shelter for a cat or dog. And read a book about how to care properly for your particular pet.

~ Loretta Swit

I was in three academic clubs, a huge book worm and the teacher's pet. I was kind of an easy target for bullies.

~ Nicole Anderson

Writing 'Book 1: The Maze of Bones' didn't feel much different than writing one of my other novels, but I thought it was very innovative to offer the website and trading card components as well for those readers who wanted to go more in depth with the Cahill experience.

~ Rick Riordan

I try to make the readers feel they've lived the events of the book. Just as you grieve if a friend is killed, you should grieve if a fictional character is killed. You should care. If somebody dies and you just go get more popcorn, it's a superficial experience isn't it?

~ George R. R. Martin

When a novel has 200,000 words, then it is possible for the reader to experience 200,000 delights, and to turn back to the first page of the book and experience them all over again, perhaps more intensely.

~ Jane Smiley

Noam Chomsky has a book, which I read for the first time when I was in Spain, called 'Fear of Democracy'. There is your answer. Fear of democracy. In Honduras, they had a sham democracy. It was run by elites, what was called a liberal democracy, but in reality was a false democracy.

~ Hugo Chavez

I would have never wanted to write another management book. There are so many of them, and everybody says the same thing about them, and they are all the same - they give the exact same advice. It's like a diet book; they all say eat less calories, exercise more, and every single book has the same conclusion.

~ Ben Horowitz

After two decades of personal finance reporting, I've heard every excuse in the book for not saving money. That said, none of them really hold up - at least over the long term.

~ Jean Chatzky

Athol Fugard became famous as a playwright, so although 'Tsotsi' the book was written in the '60s, it was only published in the '80s. It was then optioned pretty much every year by producers. I think the problem was that holding onto its period setting made it very hard to get finance.

~ Gavin Hood

Getting out of the hospital is a lot like resigning from a book club. You're not out of it until the computer says you're out of it.

~ Erma Bombeck

Honesty is the first chapter in the book of wisdom.

~ Thomas Jefferson

The truth doesn't change. It was the same when Moses got the Ten Commandments as it is today. That's the thing about the truth. That's the thing about real. It doesn't change and it doesn't have to change. Now you can put it in a different book, but it's still real. It's still the truth.

~ Dmx

I do get scared, but I think - like it says in another book I've read - feel the fear and do it anyway. I try to have courage, pray a little bit and work through it. I'd rather try, even if I fail.

~ Geri Halliwell