Great Books Quotes & Sayings

When an editor works with an author, she cannot help seeing into the medicine cabinet of his soul. All the terrible emotions, the desire for vindications, the paranoia, and the projection are bottled in there, along with all the excesses of envy, desire for revenge, all the hypochondriacal responses, rituals, defenses, and the twin obsessions with sex and money. It other words, the stuff of great books. — Betsy Lerner

The great ones do not set up offices, charge fees, give lectures, or write books. Wisdom is silent, and the most effective propaganda for truth is the force of personal example. The great ones attract disciples, lesser figures whose mission is to preach and to teach. These are gospelers who, unequal to the highest task, spend their lives in converting others. The great ones are indifferent, in the profoundest sense. They don't ask you to believe: they electrify you by their behavior. They are the awakeners. What you do with your petty life is of no concern to them. What you do with your life is only of concern to you, they seem to say. In short, their only purpose here on earth is to inspire. And what more can one ask of a human being than that? — Henry Miller

It was a pity that most people didn't actually go to libraries anymore, not when they could sit in the comfort of their own quarters and access files electronically. Want to read the new hot interstellar caper novel, or the latest issue of Beings holozine? Input the name, touch a control, and zip - it's in your datapad. . . .
There were, of course, old-fashioned beings who would still actually trundle down to where the files were. On some worlds the most ancient libraries kept books - actual bound volumes of printed matter - lined up neatly on shelves, and readers would walk the aisles, take a volume down, sniff the musty-dusty odor of it, and then carry it to a table to leisurely peruse.
There weren't many of those readers left, and they were growing rarer all the time . . . But there were some who still knew how to actually turn a page - and for those who were willing to do so, the rewards could be great indeed. — Michael Reaves And Steve Perry

I care not how humble your bookshelf may be, or how lonely the room which it adorns. Close the door of that room behind you, shut off with it all the cares of the outer world, plunge back into the soothing company of the great dead, and then you are through the magic portal into that fair land whither worry and vexation can follow you no more. You have left all that is vulgar and all that is sordid behind you. There stand your noble, silent comrades, waiting in their ranks. Pass your eye down their files. Choose your man. And then you have but to hold up your hand to him and away you go together into dreamland — Arthur Conan Doyle

There's always pressure, a great deal of pressure, when writing, since my first books were so successful. — Nicholas Sparks

I promote reading. I travel anywhere any time. In my books the indivuals face fears, issues, love, friendships, and are reminded qently that God is near! Great reads by Linda Green, Rosemary barkes,Liz Thompson, Richard Paul Evans — Susan Kay Box Brunner

Don't consider me too demanding if I ask you once again to set great store by holy books and read them as much as you can. This spiritual reading is as necessary to you as the air you
breathe. — Pio Of Pietrelcina

Most of the great books on prayer are written by 'experts' - monks, missionaries, mystics, saints. I've read scores of them, and mainly they make me feel guilty. — Philip Yancey

It gives him an eerie feeling to sit in London reading about streets - Waalstraat, Buitengracht, Buitencingel - along which he alone, of all the people around him with their heads buried in their books, has walked. But even more than by accounts of old Cape Town is he captivated by stories of ventures into the interior, reconnaissances by ox-wagon into the desert of the Great Karoo, where a traveller could trek for days on end without clapping eyes on a living soul. Zwartberg, Leeuwrivier, Dwyka: it is his country, the country of his heart, that he is reading about. — J.M. Coetzee

It can be hard to write a skillfully entertaining fiction, but a great book wants to be more, and wants more from us. — Guy Gavriel Kay

It is right that you should read according to your temperament, occupations, hobbies, and vocations. But it is a sign of great inner insecurity to be hostile to the unfamiliar, unwilling to explore the unfamiliar. In science, we respect the research worker. In literature, we should not always read the books blessed by the majority. — Anais Nin

There is a sort of homely truth and naturalness in some books which is very rare to find, and yet looks cheap enough. There may benothing lofty in the sentiment, or fine in the expression, but it is careless country talk. Homeliness is almost as great a merit in a book as in a house, if the reader would abide there. It is next to beauty, and a very high art. Some have this merit only. — Henry David Thoreau

The fact remains that books that really put gay people in the center, and especially books that do so in a way that is sexually explicit, tend not to get a great deal of mainstream attention: they don't tend to sell well, and they don't tend to win major awards. This makes the occasional exception, like Alan Hollinghurst, all the more remarkable. — Garth Greenwell

I am eternally grateful for my knack of finding in great books, some of them very funny books, reason enough to feel honored to be alive, no matter what else might be going on. — Kurt Vonnegut

I don't know where people got the idea that characters in books are supposed to be likable. Books are not in the business of creating merely likeable characters with whom you can have some simple identification with. Books are in the business of creating great stories that make you're brain go ahhbdgbdmerhbergurhbudgerbudbaaarr. — John Green

Yeah, right. Instead of watching TV, we'll practice our weird magical powers. Great. What's next? Zooming around on flying carpets? — Malia Ann Haberman

The community of the Giver had achieved at such great price. A community without danger or pain. But also, a community without music, color or art. And books. — Lois Lowry

So
I confess I have been a rake at reading. I have read those things which I ought not to have read, and I have not read those things which I ought to have read, and there is no health in me
if by health you mean an inclusive and coherent knowledge of any body of great literature. I can only protest, like all rakes in their shameful senescence, that I have had a good time. — Robertson Davies

When I was about nine years old, I announced to my mother that I was going to cook Thanksgiving dinner. And I went to the library and got this whole pile of books. I'd love to say it all turned out great. It didn't. But, sort of, from that point on, whenever there was serious cooking at home, I was the one who did it. — Nathan Myhrvold

Today at school I will learn to read at once; then tomorrow I will begin to write, and the day after tomorrow to cipher. Then with my acquirements I will earn a great deal of money, and with the first money I have in my pocket I will immediately buy for my papa a beautiful new cloth coat. But what am I saying? Cloth, indeed! It shall be all made of gold and silver, and it shall have diamond buttons. That poor man really deserves it; for to buy me books and to have me taught he has remained in his shirt sleeves ... And in this cold! It is only fathers who are capable of such sacrifices! ... — Carlo Collodi

It was the first time that he'd cried in a very long time. All of his emotions poured out now, in a great rush of release: it was sadness tinged with bitterness, but mostly an intensely deep feeling of loss. — EXO Books

With great lawyers you have discussed lepers and crooks, you've been through all of F. Scott Fitzgerald's books. — Bob Dylan

These days, there are a great many books about childhood trauma and its effects, but at the time all the experts agreed that one should forget about it as quickly as possible and pick up where you left off. — Peter Straub

The works of the great artists are silent books of eternal truths. — Stefan Zweig

I had another reason for seeking Him, for trying to espy His face, a professional one. God and literature are conflated in my mind. Why this is, I'm not sure. Perhaps because great books seem heavensent. Perhaps because I know that each nove is a puny but very valiant attempt at godlike behavior. Perhaps because there is no difference between the finest poetry and most transcendent mysticism. Perhaps because writers like Thomas Merton, who are able to enter the realm of the spirit and come away with fine, lucid prose. Perhaps because of more secular writers, like John Steinbeck, whose every passage, it seems to me, peals with religiousity and faith. It once occured to me that literature - all art really - is either talking to people about God, or talking to God about people. — Paul Quarrington

People who take books on sex to bed become frigid. You get self-conscious. You can't think a story. You can't think, "I shall do a story to improve mankind." Well, it's nonsense. All the great stories, all the really worthwhile plays, are emotional experiences. If you have to ask yourself whether or not you love a girl or you love a boy, forget it. You don't. A story is the same way. You either feel a story and need to write it, or you better not write it. — Ray Bradbury

Reading is the royal road to intellectual eminence ... Truly good books are more than mines to those who can understand them. They are the breathings of the great souls of past times. Genius is not embalmed in them, but lives in them perpetually. — William Ellery Channing

Unless you first do the hard work of answering those questions about a text, your meditations won't be grounded in what God is actually saying in the passage. Something in the passage may "hit" you - but it may hit you as expressing almost the opposite of what the biblical author, inspired by the Spirit, was saying. When that happens, you are listening to your own heart or to the spirit of your own culture, not to God's voice in the Scripture. A great number of books advise "divine reading" of the Bible today, and define the activity uncarefully as reading "not for information but to hear a personal word of God to you." This presents a false contrast. It is certainly true that meditation personalizes the Word, but before we can meditate on what the text personally means to us and our time, we must first need to know as much as possible what the author meant to say to his readers when he wrote it. — Timothy Keller

I love reading - inspirational books, leadership books, biographies. I exercise a lot and put on my audio book. Even If you would offer me a million dollars for my iPod I wouldn't give it to you, because I have some great things on it. — Robin Sharma

I am so satiated with the great number of detestable books with which we are inundated that I am reduced to punting at faro. — Voltaire

He spent his life immersed in books to the cost of everything else, even personal relationships. "Friends," he'd once said, "are probably great, but I have forty thousands friends of my own already, and each of them needs my attention. — Jasper Fforde

On a practical level, poetry isn't something anybody has really made a great living at. I might sell some books and, once in a while, someone might pay to hear me read. — Viggo Mortensen

As long as you are forced to be a woman first instead of a person, by default, you need to be a feminist. That's it. Men are people, women are women? Screw that. Screw that. I am sick of having words aimed to shut me up. I am sick of having to be anything other than a person first. Zounds! I enjoy being a girl, whatever that means. For me, that meant Star Wars figurines, mounds of books, skirts and flats. It meant Civil War reenacting and best girlfriends I'd give a kidney to and best guy friends I'd ruin a liver with and making messes and cleaning up some of them and still not knowing how to apply eye shadow. That's being a girl. That's being a person. It's the same damn thing. I wish Rush had just called me an idiot. I'm happy to be called an idiot! On the day when someone on the Internet calls me an idiot first and ugly second, I will set down my feminist battle flag and heave a great sigh. Then I will pick it back up and keep climbing. There are many more mountains to overcome. — Alexandra Petri

In the 1970s and early '80s, Shanghai was quiet, cautious, a ghost of a once-great city - and yet physically, little was changed from its glittering heyday. When visiting, I enjoyed reading books on local history and used my time off to scope out the former haunts of gangsters and jazzmen. — Nicole Mones

Maybe great books were coiled within him like springs, books that could have separated inside from outside. — Jonathan Safran Foer

There's always these giant baffling books, like 'The Da Vinci Code.' People say it's not as well written as 'Midnight's Children.' Why aren't people reading 'Midnight's Children?' Nobody knows why these phenomenons happen but they're great. — Denise Mina

In all the books love is one of the great facts that mould human life. But it is a catastrophe: it happens suddenly and overwhelmingly, and there is little to be said about it. — Virginia Woolf

It was partly the war, the revolution did the rest. The war was an artificial break in life
as if life could be put off for a time
what nonsense! The revolution broke out willy-nilly like a sigh suppressed too long. Everyone was revived, reborn, changed, transformed. You might say that everyone has been through two revolutions
his own, personal revolution as well as the general one. It seems to me that socialism is the sea, and all these separate streams, these private, individual revolutions, are flowing into it
the sea of life, the sea of spontaneity. I said life, but I mean life as you see it in a great picture, transformed by genius, creatively enriched. Only now people have decided to experience it not in books and pictures, but in themselves, not as an abstraction but in practice. — Boris Pasternak

My books are like water; those of the great geniuses are wine. (Fortunately) everybody drinks water. — Mark Twain

When I had no money, and a great book came out, I couldn't get it. I had to wait. I love the idea that I have hardcover books here and at home that I haven't read yet. That's how I view that I'm rich. I have hardcover books I may never read. — Sherman Alexie

She is a great gobbler of books, but reads only trash, memorizing nothing and leaving out the longer descriptions. — Vladimir Nabokov

The aim of great books is ethical: to teach what it means to be a man. Every major form of literary art has taken for its deeper themes what T.S. Eliot called "the permanent things"-the norms of human action. — Russell Kirk

The easiest thing about writing a book is coming up with the idea. We all have tons of great ideas for books, right? The issues come AFTER we have the great idea. — Jean Nicole Rivers

Some of my books sort of have a provocative take. Sometimes you find interesting things about characters that show they weren't necessarily the way people usually see them. It can make for lively conversations, but that's great. Spark a little controversy, get people to think about it. That's what it's all about. — Nathaniel Philbrick

The great writers have always been great readers, but that does not mean that they read all the books that, in their day, were listed as the indispensable ones. In many cases, they read fewer books than are now required in most of our colleges, but what they did read, they read well. Because they had mastered these books, they became peers with their authors. They were entitled to become authorities in their own right. In the natural course of events, a good student frequently becomes a teacher, and so, too, a good reader becomes an author. — Mortimer J. Adler

A few books well chosen, and well made use of will be more profitable than a great confused Alexandrian library. — Thomas Fuller

Three films a day, three books a week and records of great music would be enough to make me happy to the day I die. — Francois Truffaut

Gulliver was soon being read "from the cabinet council to the nursery". — John Gay

All of my sermons become books. I've been accused of having no unpublished thought. I encourage pastors to do that. I think there are so many great sermons that never really get circulation. — Max Lucado

When writing is great, Mitchell told me of the books he loved as a reader, your mind is nowhere else but in this world that started off in the mind of another human being. There are two miracles at work here. One, that someone thought of that world and people in the first place. And the second, that there's this means of transmitting it. Just little ink marks on squashed wood fiber. Bloody amazing. — David Mitchell

She had a great respect for books herself, and she wished that she had read more. One could never read enough. Never. — Alexander McCall Smith

America is a great disappointment to me. As I said in one of my books, other societies create civilisations; we build shopping malls. — Bill Bryson

In my freshman and sophomore years of college, I read dozens of books by the great thinkers of Western civilization. From Plato to Nietzsche, Homer to Shakespeare - you name it, I read it. At times it drove me crazy - picture reading hundreds of pages that sound like this every week: "All rational knowledge is either material and concerned with some object, or formal and concerned only with the form of understanding and of reason themselves and with the universal rules of thought in general without regard to differences of its objects." Come again, Kant? — Stefanie Weisman

All the ills of mankind, all the tragic misfortunes that fill the history books, all the political blunders, all the failures of the great leaders have arisen merely from a lack of skill at dancing. — Moliere

If someone considers the prophetic writings with all the diligence and reverence they are worth, while he reads and examines with great care, it is certain that in that very act he will be struck in his mind and senses by some more divine breath and will recognize that the books he reads have not been produced in a human way, but are words of God. — Origen

And it's great to have all these readers and fans who, for the most part, are very nice people, saying they love the books and the TV show. But there are so many of them and it just doesn't end. Oh, and 'selfies'! If I could clap my hands and burn out every camera phone in the world, I swear I'd do it! — George R R Martin

Difficulty will be to keep her from learning too fast and too much. She is always sitting with her little nose burrowing into books. She doesn't read them, Miss Minchin; she gobbles them up as if she were a little wolf instead of a little girl. She is always starving for new books to gobble, and she wants grown-up books - great, big, fat ones - French and German as well as English - history and biography and poets, and all sorts of things. — Frances Hodgson Burnett

I definitely have a spiritual outlook. I don't usually read self-help books, but I read a great book by a guy called Wayne Dyer, The Power of Intention, which I loved. I'm not a religious guy, in fact I'm probably agnostic but I thought what this writer had to say was really powerful. — Chris Pine

Looking back over my own life I here declare without apology that it is the study of God's Word, year after year, close communion with Christ, and great books that have nourished my soul in wondrous ways. Such authors as Fenelon, Henry Drummond, F. B. Meyer, G. Campbell Morgan, Martyn Lloyd Jones, A. W. Tozer, Hannah Whitehall Smith Oswald Chambers, Andrew Murray and John Stott have each, with their own special insights, enriched my life beyond measure. — W. Phillip Keller

If books were food, I'd weigh thirty thousand pounds. I devour the things. I'm addicted to reading, and when I'm in the middle of a great book, I'm tempted to tell my kids to eat dog food for dinner. Before you call the Department of Family and Children's Services, I said tempted. I've never actually done that. — Sandi Hutcheson

Remember, there were dragons long before men came into the world. Why, it was none other than The Great Dragons of Yore who invented the idea of knighthood. Yes, yes, that's right! Dragons had knights, Kings, princesses and queens long before men crawled out of the muck. — Sully Tarnish

Every one of the world's "great" religions utterly trivializes the immensity and beauty of the cosmos. Books like the Bible and the Koran get almost every significant fact about us and our world wrong. Every scientific domain
from cosmology to psychology to economics
has superseded and surpassed the wisdom of Scripture.
Everything of value that people get from religion can be had more honestly, without presuming anything on insufficient evidence. The rest is self-deception, set to music. — Sam Harris

And all the books you've read have been read by other people. And all the songs you've loved have been heard by other people. And that girl that's pretty to you is pretty to other people. and that if you looked at these facts when you were happy, you would feel great because you are describing 'unity. — Stephen Chbosky

Great is bookishness and the charm of books. — Augustine Birrell

Sometimes books feel like the only thing that keep her sane. Actually, she knows that they're the only reason she's still even vaguely okay right now. That's what she clings to: reading great books and seeing great films and, for as long as she's immersed in them, being able to forget, if only for a short time, about the reality of her life. — Steph Bowe

We had almost exactly a year together as a couple after that. She wanted to swim the Great Barrier Reef. I wish we had gone. I wish we had read books to each other. We had one weekend of sexy-times in New York City while her father looked after the kids. I wish we'd had more. I wish we'd walked more. I wish we hadn't sat in front of the TV so much. It was nice, we cuddled, we laughed at Stephen Colbert and Seth Meyers, but it didn't make much in the way of memories. We did such ordinary, banal things. Ordered pizza and played Trivial Pursuit with her sister and her dad. Helped the kids with homework. We did dishes together more than we ever made love. What kind of life is that?"
"Real life," Harper said. — Joe Hill

The guys in my band are great-we watch movies, we eat pizza, take walks, read books. Everybody has a really great sense of humor. And my boyfriend comes and visits me on the road. — Lisa Loeb

Antiphon, as another man gets pleasure from a good horse, or a dog, or a bird, I get even more pleasure from good friends. And if I have something good, I teach it to them, and I introduce them to others who will be useful to them with respect to virtue. And together with my friends I go through the treasures of wise men of old which they left behind written in books, and we peruse them. If we see something good, we pick it out and hold it to be a great profit, if we are able to prove useful to one another. — Socrates

The voyages of the great Chinese fleet were missions of exploration and commerce. They were not enterprises of conquest. No yearning for domination obliged Zheng to scorn or condemn what he found. What was not admirable was at least worthy of curiosity. And from trip to trip, the imperial library in Beijing continued growing until it held four thousand books that collected the wisdom of the world.
At the time, the king of Portugal had six books. — Eduardo Galeano

Books," says E. P. Whipple, "are lighthouses erected in the great sea of time." "As a rule," said Benjamin Disraeli, "the most successful man in life is the man who has the best information. — Orison Swett Marden

Amedeo loved thick tomes, and in tackling them he felt the physical pleasure of undertaking a great task. Weighing them in his hand, thick, closely printed, squat, he would consider with some apprehension the number of pages, the length of the chapters, then venture into them, a bit reluctant at the beginning, without any desire to perform the initial chore of remembering the names, catching the drift of the story; then he would entrust himself to it, running along the lines, crossing the grid of the uniform page, and beyond the leaden print the flame and fire of battle appeared, the cannonball that, whistling through the sky, fell at the feet of Prince Andrei, and the shop filled with engravings and statues where Frederic Moreau, his heart in his mouth, was to meet the Arnoux family. Beyond the surface of the page you entered a world where life was more alive than here on this side ... — Italo Calvino

This is what I believe is most important: getting good books into the hands of kids - books that will make them want to say, 'Wow, that was great. Give me another one to read.' — James Patterson

You can cover a great deal of Countries in books. — Andrew Long

Today we hear a great deal about Organizational Men, Mass Culture, Conformity, the Lonely Crowd, the Power Elite and its Conspiracy of Mediocrity. We forget that the very volume of this criticism is an indication that our society is still radically pluralistic. Not only are there plenty of exceptionalists who take exception to the stereotyping of the mass culture but that very string of epithets comes from a series of books that have been recent best-sellers, symptoms of a popular, living tradition of dissent from things as they are. — Kenneth Rexroth

Early in my publishing career, someone told me I'd need to have five books in print before I could quit my job as a journalist. Turns out it was closer to 10 books. It also turns out that while it's great to see my titles on bookstore shelves, my best customers are schools and libraries. — Kate Klise

A. Huxley died at 69, much too early for such a fierce talent, and I read all his works but actually Point Counter Point did help a bit in carrying me through the factories and the drunk tanks and the unsavory ladies. that book along with Hamsun's Hunger they helped a bit. great books are the ones we need. — Charles Bukowski

I sat on the bench by the willows and at my honey bun and read Triton. There are some awful things in the world, it's true, but there are also some great books. When I grow up I would like to write something that someone could read sitting on a bench on a day that isn't all that warm and they could sit reading it and totally forget where they were or what time it was so that they were more inside the book than inside their own head. I'd like to write like Delany or Heinlein or Le Guin. — Jo Walton

There are several GREAT places to buy books while visiting in Cherry Hill Pennsylvania — Ida Mingle

What an advantage that knowledge can be stored in books! The knowledge lies there like hermetically sealed provisions waiting for the day when you may need a meal. Surely what the Collector was doing as he pored over his military manuals, was proving the superiority of the European way of doing things, of European culture itself. This was a culture so flexible that whatever he needed was there in a book at his elbow. An ordinary sort of man, he could, with the help of an oil-lamp, turn himself into a great military engineer, a bishop, an explorer or a General overnight, if the fancy took him. — J.G. Farrell

My father, Emil Palade, was professor of philosophy, and my mother, Constanta Cantemir-Palade, was a teacher. The family environment explains why I acquired early in life great respect for books, scholars and education. — George Emil Palade

When he went to PARC for his formal interview, Kay was asked what he hoped his great achievement there would be. "A personal computer," he answered. Asked what that was, he picked up a notebook-size portfolio, flipped open its cover, and said, "This will be a flat-panel display. There'll be a keyboard here on the bottom, and enough power to store your mail, files, music, artwork, and books. All in a package about this size and weighing a couple of pounds. That's what I'm talking about." His interviewer scratched his head and muttered to himself, "Yeah, right." But Kay got the job. — Walter Isaacson

It is commonly said to my little friend Legion: Read the great writers for style. But I say to him: Read the great dead masters for ideas. Devour them, Fletcherize them, digest, assimilate, make them part of your blood; let the enriched blood visit your brain. The resultant activities will be fairly your own, and the little kinks and convolutions of your brain, which are entirely different from the kinks of any other brain, will furnish you all the style you will ever get.
There are no really fresh ideas; just as there is not any fresh air. Air and ideas are refreshed and refreshing, vitalized and vitalizing; but the thoughts have been thought before and the air has been breathed before. — Eugene Manlove Rhodes

Books took, in her young life, the place of companions and childish games. She read a great deal without guidance or discrimination, and gained all her ideas on life, all her faith, all her ideals and aims and aspirations from books. Books stood between her and reality, and hid from her those deep truths that can never be learnt from even the greatest literary production, but can only be understood after long years of untiring observation and experience. It was in books also that Irene found her ideal of the man she could love. Her hero was an exceedingly complicated character. — Aimee Dostoyevsky

I have a passion for words. I love words. And I'm just learning and developing my skills for words. I do books and I do journalism and plays. I have a broad palette. I don't have a great eye for direction. I love working with actors and I work very well with them because I appreciate what they bring to the table. I'd never say never, of course, but I look at it and don't really fancy it. I want to try and master the word side of it first. — Geoff Thompson

Reading is the basic springboard for learning. And books provide the liftoff. They are the great equalizer, opening up new worlds to everyone. — Mary Pope Osborne

There were adventure stories supplied with cloths for mopping your brow, thrillers containing pressed leaves of soothing valerian to be sniffed when the suspense became too great, and books with stout locks sealed by the Atlantean censorship authorities ("Sale permitted, reading prohibited!"). One shop sold nothing but 'half' works that broke off in the middle because their author had died while writing them; another specialised in novels whose protagonists were insects. I also saw a Wolperting shop that sold nothing but books on chess and another patronised exclusively by dwarfs with blond beards, all of whom wore eye-shades. — Walter Moers

He came to the conclusion that humans confused the content with the container.
They would gorge themselves on great plates of inferior food, imagining it to be delicious because there was simply so much of it. Or, they would make half wits their leaders, merely because they were pleasing to the eye, or because their words were spoken in honeyed voices.
And when it came to information, they would champion weighty tomes that contained almost no real content, while shunning small books that imparted real truth. — Tahir Shah

Top 3 favorite books? I love finding really great children's books. My daughter was given "Pickle Chiffon Pie" which is so fantastic. We also love "Tacky the Penguin", and I love "Guji Guji" - all because they teach great life lessons without being teachy. — Abbie Schiller

In one of my recent books, 'The Success Principles,' I taught 64 lessons that help people achieve what they want out of life. From taking nothing less than 100 percent responsibility for your life to empowering others, these are the fundamentals to success - and to great leadership. — Jack Canfield

Great books write themselves, only bad books have to be written. — F Scott Fitzgerald

Personally, I was never more passionate about manga than when preparing for my college entrance exams. It's a period of life when young people appear to have a great deal of freedom, but are in many ways actually opressed. Just when they find themselves powerfully attracted to members of opposite sex, they have to really crack the books. To escape from this depressing situation, they often find themselves wishing they could live in a world of their own - a world they can say is truly theirs, a world unknown even to their parents. To young people, anime is something they incorporate into this private world.
I often refer to this feeling as one yearning for a lost world. It's a sense that although you may currently be living in a world of constraints, if you were free from those constraints, you would be able to do all sorts of things. And it's that feeling, I believe, that makes mid-teens so passionate about anime. — Hayao Miyazaki

I certainly couldn't have survived my childhood without books. All that deprivation and pain
abuse, broken home, a runaway sister, a brother with cancer
the books allowed me to withstand. They sustained me. I read still, prolifically, with great passion, but never like I read in those days: in those days it was life or death. — Junot Diaz

I looked at the book lying on a table. Though not a great reader myself, I knew that those who were - even Nora - could grow testy when one came between them and their books. — Susan Higginbotham

If it wasn't for her literally doing my homework for me, I would not have even graduated high school. Guaranteed ... My mom always said, 'Luck is nothing but preparation and opportunity.' I think because I've had that history of not really being great in school, I probably try to overcompensate. That's why I try to read so many books. Just so I don't feel ... uneducated. — Channing Tatum

It would be worth the while to select our reading, for books are the society we keep; to read only the serenely true; never statistics, nor fiction, nor news, nor reports, nor periodicals, but only great poems, and when they failed, read them again, or perchance write more. Instead of other sacrifice, we might offer up our perfect (teleia) thoughts to the gods daily, in hymns or psalms. For we should be at the helm at least once a day. — Henry David Thoreau

My books are water; those of the great geniuses are wine - everybody drinks water. — Marilyn French

I know that I am very popular in Holland, in fact I have visited Amsterdam several times to publicize my books. I have a great publisher in Holland and they have published all of my books in Dutch. — Jackie Collins

One had only to look at the map to see that Panama was the proper place for the canal. The route was already well established, there was a railroad, there were thriving cities at each end. Only at Panama could a sea-level canal be built. It was really no great issue at all. Naturally there were problems. There were always problems. There had been large, formidable problems at Suez, and to many respected authorities they too had seemed insurmountable. But as time passed, as the work moved ahead at Suez, indeed as difficulties increased, men of genius had come forth to meet and conquer those difficulties. The same would happen again. For every challenge there would be a man of genius capable of meeting and conquering it. One must trust to inspiration. As for the money, there was money aplenty in France just waiting for the opening of the subscription books. — David McCullough

They came generally from people writing theses on fantasy or on the Dark Is Rising books. They were full of questions I'd never thought about and false assumptions that I didn't want to think about. They would ask me in great detail for, say, the specific local and mythical derivations of my Greenwitch, a leaf-figure thrown over a Cornish cliff as a fertility sacrifice, and I would have to write back and say, "I'm terribly sorry; I made it all up." They told me I echoed Hassidic myth, which I hadn't read, and the Mormon suprastructure, which I'd never even heard of. They saw symbols and buried meanings and allegories everywhere. I'd thought I was making a clear soup, but for them it was a thick mysterious stew.

from "In Defense of the the Artist" in Signposts to Criticism of Children's Literature (1983) — Susan Cooper

And for adults, the world of fantasy books returns to us the great words of power which, in order to be tamed, we have excised from our adult vocabularies. These words are the pornography of innocence, words which adults no longer use with other adults, and so we laugh at them and consign them to the nursery, fear masking as cynicism. These are the words that were forged in the earth, air, fire, and water of human existence, and the words are:
Love. Hate. Good. Evil. Courage. Honor. Truth. — Jane Yolen