Book Quotes - Page 37

• Nay, if there be any mistakes in the Bible, there may as well be a thousand. If there be one falsehood in that book, it did not come from the God of truth

  John Wesley

  Mistake, May, Thousand

  John Wesley, John Emory (1758). “Journals”, p.459

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• Read the most useful books, and that regularly and constantly.

  John Wesley

  John Wesley (1825). “The Life of the Rev. John Wesley ... to which is Prefixed Some Account of His Ancestors and Relations; with the Life of the Rev. Charles Wesley, Etc”, p.335

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• Books have that strange quality, that being of the frailest and tenderest matter, they outlast brass, iron and marble.

  William Drummond

  Iron, Quality, Matter

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• I am a beau in nothing but my books.

  Adam Smith

  Adam Smith, Robert L. Heilbroner, Laurence J. Malone (1987). “The Essential Adam Smith”, p.7, W. W. Norton & Company

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• A year ago, six months ago, I thought that I was an artist. I no longer think about it, I am. Everything that was literature has fallen from me. There are no more books to be written, thank God. This then? This is not a book. This is libel, slander, defamation of character. This is not a book, in the ordinary sense of the word. No, this is a prolonged insult, a gob of spit in the face of Art, a kick in the pants to God, Man, Destiny, Time, Love, Beauty . . . what you will.

  Henry Miller

  Art, Character, Love Is

  Henry Miller, Mary V. Dearborn (2007). “Crazy Cock”, p.8, Grove/Atlantic, Inc.

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• I can never read this book, just like I can never see a movie that I wrote a screenplay for. I can read it and see it physically, but I can't accurately judge it. I'm too close to it. If I read it ten times I'll have ten different reactions.

  Richard Price

  Judging, Different, Reactions

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• I started thinking about my relationship with my students; I'm this guy who comes in from book - and movie - land and descends on angel wings into their classroom.

  Richard Price

  Relationship, Angel, Thinking

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• If you're writing a book that takes place in New York in the moment, you can't not write about 9-11; you can't not integrate it. My main character's view is the Statue of Liberty and the Trade Center. It doesn't have to take over, but it has to be acknowledged.

  Richard Price

  New York, Character, Writing

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• Don't tell me what's in the Red Book. I wrote the goddamned thing. And I know that it's a lot of crap.

  Paul Martin

  Red, Crap, Knows

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• In Endless Quest books, you start the plot, and the character has to make choices. Then you have to write one choice over here, one choice over there. The author might get one or two choices out.

  Margaret Weis

  Character, Writing, Two

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• Rocks are records of events that took place at the time they formed. They are books. They have a different vocabulary, a different alphabet, but you learn how to read them.

  John McPhee

  Vocabulary, Rocks, Events

  John McPhee (2000). “Annals of the Former World”, p.164, Macmillan

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• If you take out of your statutes, your constitution, your family life all that is taken from the Sacred Book, what would there be left to bind society together?

  Benjamin Harrison

  Taken, Together, Sacred

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• You go into the office and take a book or two from the shelves. You read a few lines, like your life depended on reading 'em right. But you know your life doesn't depend on anything that makes sense, and you wonder where in the hell you got the idea it did; and you begin to get sore.

  Jim Thompson

  Reading, Ideas, Two

  Jim Thompson (1997). “Crime novels: American noir of the 1950s”

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• In lots of books I read, the writer seems to go haywire every time he reaches a high point. He’ll start leaving out punctuation and running his words together and babble about stars flashing and sinking into a deep dreamless sea. And you can’t figure out whether the hero’s laying his girl or a cornerstone. I guess that kind of crap is supposed to be pretty deep stuff—a lot of the book reviewers eat it up, I notice. But the way I see it is, the writer is just too goddam lazy to do his job. And I’m not lazy, whatever else I am. I’ll tell you everything.

  Jim Thompson

  Girl, Running, Jobs

  Jim Thompson (1997). “Crime novels: American noir of the 1950s”

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• I was in a job interview and I opened a book and started reading. Then I said to the guy 'Let me ask you a question. If you are in a spaceship that is traveling at the speed of light, and you turn on the headlights, does anything happen?' He said 'I don't know'. I said 'I don't want your job'.

  Steven Wright

  Funny, Jobs, Reading

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• If I book a hotel it's actually very funny. It's very nice to be a genuine Mr Smith.

  Robert Smith

  Nice, Genuine, Hotel

  Interview with "Q" magazine, February 2000.

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• You just don't give up. There have been times when everything seemed to conspire against getting a book done or printed, and I would feel like turning my back on the whole thing. But I came back and persisted

  Dee Brown

  Giving Up, Don't Give Up, Done

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• I keep to old books, for they teach me something; from the new I learn very little

  Voltaire

  Reading, Littles, Teach

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• What is a great love of books? It is something like a personal introduction to the great and good men of all past times. Books, it is true, are silent as you see them on their shelves; but, silent as they are, when I enter a library I feel as if almost the dead were present, and I know if I put questions to these books they will answer me with all the faithfulness and fulness which has been left in them by the great men who have left the books with us.

  John Bright

  Men, Past, Great Love

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• A small number of choice books are sufficient.

  Voltaire

  Small Numbers, Choices, Library

  Voltaire (1824). “A philosophical dictionary: from the French”, p.48

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• I would prefer to have one comfortable room well stocked with books to all you could give me in the way of decoration which the highest art could supply.

  John Bright

  Art, Giving, Way

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• In every book I ever wrote the point was to do as much as you could after coming to terms with your limitations.

  Stephen Elliott

  Term, Limitation

  Stephen Elliott (2010). “The Adderall Diaries: A Memoir of Moods, Masochism, and Murder (Large Print 16pt)”, p.237, ReadHowYouWant.com

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• The best book I read in 2007 was Stoner by John Williams. It’s perhaps the best book I’ve read in years.

  Stephen Elliott

  Years, Stoners

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• Books and minds only work when they're open.

  James Dewar

  Mind

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• The book can produce an addiction as fierce as heroin or nicotine, forcing us to spend much of our lives, like junkies, in book shops and libraries, those literary counterparts to the opium den.

  Phillip Adams

  Addiction, Library, Fierce

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