Quotes about booking
page 48

Charlotte Brontë photo
Charles Stross photo

“Liz isn’t simply not going by the book, she’s just about throwing it in the shredder.”

Source: Halting State (2007), Chapter 32, “Sue: Civil Contingencies” (p. 263)

John Byrne photo
Taylor Caldwell photo
Tom Petty photo
Piet Mondrian photo

“Kandinsky points out [in his book On the Spiritual in Art] that Theosophy (in its true sense; not as it generally appears) is yet another expression of the same spiritual movement which we are now seeing in painting.”

Piet Mondrian (1872–1944) Peintre Néerlandais

In 'De Nieuwe beelding in de Schilderkunst', Piet Mondriaan, 'De Stijl' No. 1, October 1917, p. 54
1910's

Lois Duncan photo

“The reasons for censorship reflect the social climate of the times. The publisher of Debutante Hill asked me to revise the manuscript because I had a 19-year-old boy (the ‘bad guy’) drink a beer. When I changed the beer to a Coke, the book was published and won the ‘Seventeenth Summer Literary Award.”

Lois Duncan (1934–2016) American young-adult and children's writer

On censorship, interview https://web-beta.archive.org/web/20130801124618/http://absolutewrite.com/specialty_writing/lois_duncan.htm in Absolute Write (2002)
1990–2002

Jeet Thayil photo
Michael von Faulhaber photo
Ernie Irvan photo

“If you look at the record books, Dale Earnhardt's done everything, except win the Daytona 500. Now they can't have that riding over him. Now they're just going to say, 'Dale Earnhardt, 1998 Daytona 500 winner,' and his shoulders are going to get lighter every time.”

Ernie Irvan (1959) American racing driver

As quoted in "Daytona 500's Magical Aura: Dale Earnhardt's 1998 Ride" http://bleacherreport.com/articles/610050-daytonas-magical-aura-dale-earnhardts-1998-daytona-500 by Ashley McCubbin in Bleacher Report (15 February 2011).

Pauline Kael photo
Christian David Ginsburg photo
Norman Mailer photo

“The difference between writing a book and being on television is the difference between conceiving a child and having a baby made in a test tube.”

Norman Mailer (1923–2007) American novelist, journalist, essayist, playwright, film maker, actor and political candidate

"The Siege of Mailer : Hero to Historian" in The Village Voice (21 January 1971); republished in Conversations with Norman Mailer (1988), edited by J. Michael Lennon

Francisco De Goya photo

“Caption, plate 43 of Los Caprichos etching and aquatint, 1796-97; Museo Nacional del Prado, Madrid; Robert Hughes: in Goya. Borzoi Book - Alfred Knopf, New York, 2003, p. 73”

Francisco De Goya (1746–1828) Spanish painter and printmaker (1746–1828)

El sueño de la razón produce monstruos.
The 'monsters' in this etching are bats and owls, flying around the sleeper in his dream
1790s

Jean Dubuffet photo
Joyce Kilmer photo
Robert Barr (writer) photo

“Publishers are humane men, and rarely commit crimes. Authors, however, are a hardened set, who usually perpertrate a felony every time they issue a book.”

Robert Barr (writer) (1849–1912) Scottish-Canadian novelist

"The Adventure of the Second Swag" from The Triumphs of Eugene Valmont (1906)

Arun Shourie photo
Bernard Le Bovier de Fontenelle photo
P. L. Travers photo

“A writer is, after all, only half his book. The other half is the reader and from the reader the writer learns.”

P. L. Travers (1899–1996) Australian-British novelist, actress and journalist

As quoted in The New York Times (2 July 1978)

James Inhofe photo
Robert J. Marks II photo

“Saying the Bible is not a book about science is like saying a cookbook is not a book about chemistry.”

Robert J. Marks II (1950) American electrical engineering researcher and intelligent design advocate

Pursuance of truth requires consideration of a creator. If you define science to exclude the possibility of a creator, it isn’t a pursuance of truth.
The universe as accepted by science in terms of size and age is not big enough or old enough to explain evolution.
Q&A: ‘Expelled’s’ Robert Marks, From an interview with Jerry Pierce, 2008-01-28, 2008-02-18 http://www.sbtexan.com/default.asp?action=article&aid=5534&issue=2/4/2008,

James Bryce, 1st Viscount Bryce photo

“What do you think of J. M. Keynes's book? … The condemnation of the work of the Conference as a whole is none too severe. I remember few cases in history where negotiators might have done so much good, and have done so much evil.”

James Bryce, 1st Viscount Bryce (1838–1922) British academic, jurist, historian and Liberal politician

Letter to C. P. Scott (20 January 1920), in Trevor Wilson (ed.), The Political Diaries of C. P. Scott, 1911-1928 (London: Collins, 1970), p. 380
1920s

Logan Pearsall Smith photo
Tucker Max photo

“The biggest thing I learned was, especially the way I operate and how I am as a person, if I'm going to do a creative endeavor, I need to have full, complete control. Top to bottom. And with my book and website, I always had that. With the website, definitely, with the book, basically, with the movie…I didn't in a lot of ways. Nils and I, we had a lot of control, more control probably than almost any first time movie makers do within a normal studio system. We were in the middle between independent and not, because someone else paid for everything, and they kind of let us do what we wanted, but then once the movie was done creatively, it went in a direction that I did not want it to go, and there was nothing I could really do about it. It's hard enough to swim in that movie current by yourself, but when you've got weights tied to you and someone pulling you in a different direction, it's almost impossible. You need to pick a direction and go with it. If you're going to be a big studio movie, go be that, and if you're going to go be a rogue independent film, go be that. We had different people with different levels of authority on the movie that pulled us in different directions, and it just doesn't work. Either be in control or let someone else do it, but don't…too many chefs. I'm going to be better next time. Failure instructs, failure improves. Failure shouldn't deter you, unless you're just bad at it.”

Tucker Max (1975) Internet personality; blogger; author

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZC6zdVKoNr8 (March 2010).

Alberto Manguel photo

“A book brings its own history to the reader.”

Alberto Manguel (1948) writer

The Last Page, p. 16.
A History of Reading (1996)

“A sweet attractive kinde of grace,
A full assurance given by lookes,
Continuall comfort in a face
The lineaments of Gospell bookes.”

Mathew Roydon (1583–1622) English poet

An Elegie; or Friend's Passion for his Astrophill, reported in Bartlett's Familiar Quotations, 10th ed. (1919). This piece was errantly ascribed to Edmund Spenser, and was printed in The Phœnix' Nest (1593), where it is anonymous. Todd has shown that it was written by Mathew Roydon.

Alexander Pope photo

“The famous Lord Hallifax (though so much talked of) was rather a pretender to taste, than really possessed of it.—When I had finished the two or three first books of my translation of the Iliad, that lord, "desired to have the pleasure of hearing them read at his house." Addison, Congreve, and Garth, were there at the reading.—In four or five places, Lord Hallifax stopped me very civilly; and with a speech, each time of much the same kind: "I beg your pardon, Mr. Pope, but there is something in that passage that does not quite please me.—Be so good as to mark the place, and consider it a little at your leisure.—I am sure you can give it a little turn."—I returned from Lord Hallifax's with Dr. Garth, in his chariot; and as we were going along, was saying to the doctor, that my lord had laid me under a good deal of difficulty, by such loose and general observations; that I had been thinking over the passages almost ever since, and could not guess at what it was that offended his lordship in either of them.—Garth laughed heartily at my embarrassment; said, I had not been long enough acquainted with Lord Hallifax, to know his way yet: that I need not puzzle myself in looking those places over and over when I got home. "All you need do, (said he) is to leave them just as they are; call on Lord Hallifax two or three months hence, thank him for his kind observations on those passages; and then read them to him as altered. I have known him much longer than you have, and will be answerable for the event."—I followed his advice; waited on Lord Hallifax some time after: said, I hoped he would find his objections to those passages removed[; ] read them to him exactly as they were at first; and his lordship was extremely pleased with them, and cried out, "Ay now, Mr. Pope, they are perfectly right! nothing can be better."”

Alexander Pope (1688–1744) eighteenth century English poet

As quoted in Anecdotes, Observations, and Characters, of Books and Men (1820) by Joseph Spence [published from the original papers; with notes, and a life of the author, by Samuel Weller Singer]; "Spence's Anecdotes", Section IV. pp. 134–136.
Attributed

“The purpose of this book is to discuss and present evidence for the general thesis that the flow of energy through a system acts to organize that system.”

Harold J. Morowitz (1927–2016) American biophysicist

Energy Flow in Biology: Biological Organization as a Problem in Thermal Physics (1968), p. 2.
Italics are in the original. Later quoted on the inside front cover of The Last Whole Earth Catalog.

Arthur Helps photo
George Washington Plunkitt photo
Matthijs Maris photo
Jerome Corsi photo
El Lissitsky photo

“At the time when I was working on the exhibitions I was also very active as a book artist and in photo montage (for I could carry out those assignments when my sickness obliged me remain lying down).”

El Lissitsky (1890–1941) Soviet artist, designer, photographer, teacher, typographer and architect

1926 - 1941, Autobiography of the artist' (1941)

Daniel Handler photo
Francis Place photo
James Macpherson photo

“All hail, Macpherson! hail to thee, Sire of Ossian! The Phantom was begotten by the suing embrace of all impudent Highlander upon a cloud of tradition—it travelled southward, where it was greeted with acclamation, and the thin Consistence took its course through Europe, upon the breath of popular applause. […] Having had the good fortune to be born and reared in a mountainous country, from my very childhood I have felt the falsehood that pervades the volumes imposed upon the world under the name of Ossian. From what I saw with my own eyes, I knew that the imagery was spurious. In Nature everything is distinct, yet nothing defined into absolute independent singleness. In Macpherson's work, it is exactly the reverse; every thing (that is not stolen) is in this manner defined, insulated, dislocated, deadened,—yet nothing distinct. It will always be so when words are substituted for things. […] Yet, much as those pretended treasures of antiquity have been admired, they have been wholly uninfluential upon the literature of the Country. No succeeding writer appears to have taught from them a ray of inspiration; no author, in the least distinguished, has ventured formally to imitate them—except the boy, Chatterton, on their first appearance. […] This incapacity to amalgamate with the literature of the Island, is, in my estimation, a decisive proof that the book is essentially unnatural; nor should I require any other to demonstrate it to be a forgery, audacious as worthless.”

James Macpherson (1736–1796) Scottish writer, poet, translator, and politician

William Wordsworth, "Essay Supplementary to the Preface" http://spenserians.cath.vt.edu/TextRecord.php?textsid=35963 in Poems by William Wordsworth, Vol. I (1815), pp. 363–365.
Criticism

“When challenged why he had written so little, he fired back: "Moses wrote one book. Then what did he do?"”

Sidney Morgenbesser (1921–2004) American philosopher

The Independent, The Independent, Professor Sidney Morgenbesser: Philosopher celebrated for his withering New York Jewish humour http://www.independent.co.uk/news/obituaries/professor-sidney-morgenbesser-550224.html, 6 August 2004. The Times, Sidney Morgenbesser: Erudite and influential American linguistic philosopher with the analytical acuity of Spinoza and the blunt wit of Groucho Marx https://www.thetimes.co.uk/article/sidney-morgenbesser-5cz8gg8qfvm, September 8, 2004.

Kent Hovind photo
Nancy Peters photo
Henry Miller photo
Chrétien de Troyes photo
Báb photo
Vitruvius photo
Leo Tolstoy photo
Walter Rauschenbusch photo
Jack Buck photo
Everett Dean Martin photo
Walter Slezak photo
Roger Manganelli photo
Graham Greene photo
Ernest Bramah photo
August-Wilhelm Scheer photo
Theodore L. Cuyler photo

“God does not give us ready money. He issues promissory notes, and then pays them when faith presents them at the throne. Each one of us has a check-book.”

Theodore L. Cuyler (1822–1909) American minister

Source: Dictionary of Burning Words of Brilliant Writers (1895), P. 239.

Carlos Menem photo

“English: "My go-to book is the complete works of Socrates"”

Carlos Menem (1930) Argentine politician who was President of Argentina from 1989 to 1999

"Mi libro de cabecera son las obras completas de Sócrates"
The well-known philosopher never published any written works.
Attributed

Georges Bataille photo
Peter F. Drucker photo

“In book subjects a student can only do a student's work. All that can be measured is how well he learns, rather than how well he performs. All he can show is promise.”

Peter F. Drucker (1909–2005) American business consultant

Source: 1930s- 1950s, Landmarks of Tomorrow: A Report on the New 'Post-Modern' World (1959), p. 144

Richard Feynman photo
Roberto Mangabeira Unger photo

“My posts are the bible. My brain is the bible. The books I'm releasing are bibles. It's all bible, baby”

Dril Twitter user

[ "We Interviewed the Guy Behind @dril, the Undisputed King of Twitter", Caffier, Justin, August 24, 2018, Vice, August 25, 2018, http://archive.today/2018.08.26-011141/https://www.vice.com/en_us/article/3kymv8/we-interviewed-the-guy-behind-dril-the-undisputed-king-of-twitter, August 25, 2018, no https://www.vice.com/en_us/article/3kymv8/we-interviewed-the-guy-behind-dril-the-undisputed-king-of-twitter,]
dril in interviews

Lois McMaster Bujold photo

“I've always tried to write the kind of book I most loved to read: character-centered adventure.”

Lois McMaster Bujold (1949) Science Fiction and fantasy author from the USA

"'A Conversation With Lois McMaster Bujold", p. 60
The Vorkosigan Companion (2008)

Martin Amis photo

“They can't ban or burn Larkin's books. What they can embark on is the more genteel process of literary demotion.”

Martin Amis (1949) Welsh novelist

"Political Correctness: Robert Bly and Philip Larkin" (1997)

Vladimir Lenin photo
Robert Maynard Hutchins photo
Ulf Ekman photo

“We charismatics love to say we're going back to the Christianity of the Book of Acts. And at that time, there was only one Church.”

Ulf Ekman (1950) Swedish chaplain

Ulf Ekman Says Prophetic Word Confirmed His Catholic Conversion http://www.charismanews.com/world/43126-ulf-ekman-says-prophetic-word-confirmed-his-catholic-conversion Charisma News by Likas Berggren, 3/14/2014

Norman Angell photo
Lloyd deMause photo
James Joyce photo

“I want to give a picture of Dublin so complete that if the city suddenly disappeared from the earth it could be reconstructed out of my book.”

Said in conversation with Frank Budgen, Zurich, 1918, as told by Budgen http://digicoll.library.wisc.edu/cgi-bin/JoyceColl/JoyceColl-idx?type=turn&entity=JoyceColl.BudgenUlysses.p0092&id=JoyceColl.BudgenUlysses&isize=M&pview=hide in his book James Joyce and the Making of "Ulysses" (1934), ch. IV

Joseph Joubert photo
Paul Krugman photo
Robert Charles Wilson photo
John Green photo
Bruce Parry photo
George Henry Lewes photo
Robert Hunter (author) photo

“The earliest full-length account of a chariot race appears in Book xxiii of the Iliad.”

Richard Arnold Epstein (1927) American physicist

Source: The Theory of Gambling and Statistical Logic (Revised Edition) 1977, Chapter Nine, Weighted Statistical Logic And Statistical Games, p. 287

Gore Vidal photo
Nicholas Serota photo
Francisco Franco photo
Iain Banks photo
Fran Lebowitz photo
Thomas Carlyle photo

“In books lies the soul of the whole Past Time; the articulate audible voice of the Past, when the body and material substance of it has altogether vanished like a dream.”

Thomas Carlyle (1795–1881) Scottish philosopher, satirical writer, essayist, historian and teacher

1840s, Heroes and Hero-Worship (1840), The Hero as Man of Letters

Jadunath Sarkar photo

““Under it there can be only one faith, one people and one all overriding authority. The State is a religious trust administered solely by His people (the faithful) acting in obedience to the Commander of the Faithful, who was in theory, and very often in practice too, the supreme General of the Army of militant Islam (Janud). There could be no place for non-believers. Even Jews and Christians could not be full citizens of it, though they somewhat approached the Muslims by reason of their being ‘People of the Book’ or believers in the Bible, which the Prophet of Islam accepted as revealed… “As for the Hindus and Zoroastrians, they had no place in such a political system. If their existence was tolerated, it was only to use them as hewers of wood and drawers of water, as tax-payers, ‘Khiraj-guzar’, for the benefit of the dominant sect of the Faithful. They were called Zimmis or people under a contract of protection by the Muslim State on condition of certain services to be rendered by them and certain political and civil disabilities to be borne by them to prevent them from growing strong. The very term Zimmi is an insulting title. It connotes political inferiority and helplessness like the status of a minor proprietor perpetually under a guardian; such protected people could not claim equality with the citizens of the Muslim theocracy.”

Jadunath Sarkar (1870–1958) Indian historian

Jadunath Sarkar, cited in R.C. Majumdar (ed.), The History of the Indian People and Culture, Volume VI, The Delhi Sultanate, Bombay, 1960, pp. 617-18. Quoted in S.R.Goel, The Calcutta Quran Petition (1999) ISBN 9788185990583

Will Eisner photo

“Adolf Hitler, while spending three years in jail for the Beer Hall Putsch, writes his famous book “Mein Kampf.””

Will Eisner (1917–2005) American cartoonist

The Plot: The Secret Story of the Protocols of the Elders of Zion (10/2/2005)

James Branch Cabell photo
Sam Harris photo

“As a source of objective morality, the Bible is one of the worst books we have. It might be the very worst, in fact—if we didn't also happen to have the Qur'an.”

Sam Harris (1967) American author, philosopher and neuroscientist

Sam Harris, "The Myth of Secular Moral Chaos" (29 March 2006) http://www.secularhumanism.org/index.php/articles/2863 — in Free Inquiry, Vol. 26, issue 3
2000s

Christopher Hitchens photo