Life is a wonderful thing to talk about, or to read about in history books - but it is terrible when one has to live it.
Jean Anouilh

When I'm not writing or tweaking my computer, I do embroidery. When I'm not plunging into the past, tweaking, or embroidering, I'm reading books about history, computers, or embroidery.
Lynn Abbey

I'm one of those writers who, when writing, believes she's god-and that she hasn't bestowed free will on any of her characters. In that sense there are no surprises in any of my books.
Lynn Abbey

I write sets of books, but I've also written a lot of orphans.
Lynn Abbey

Books choose their authors; the act of creation is not entirely a rational and conscious one.
Salman Rushdie

Books like friends, should be few and well-chosen.
Samuel Johnson

Books that you carry to the fire, and hold readily in your hand, are most useful after all.
Samuel Johnson

I asked a French critic a couple of years ago why my books did so well in France. He said it was because in my novels people both act and think. I got a kick out of that.
Jim Harrison

I enjoy about 1 out of 100 movies, it's about the same proportion to books published that I care to read.
Jim Harrison

The response to 'The Greatest Generation' and the books that followed has been one of the most satisfying experiences of my life.
Tom Brokaw

Literary imagination is an aesthetic object offered by a writer to a lover of books.
Gaston Bachelard

For many years I had heard about an underworld consisting of people who act out a vampire fantasy while I was living in New York. Fortunately for me there are also several books on the phenomena.
James Patterson

I've always had great respect for Paddington because he is amusingly English and eccentric. He is a great British institution and my generation grew up with the books and then Michael Horden's animations.
Stephen Fry

Without words, without writing and without books there would be no history, there could be no concept of humanity.
Hermann Hesse

Many good sayings are to be found in holy books, but merely reading them will not make one religious.
Ramakrishna

The Twist was a guided missile launched from the ghetto into the heart of suburbia. The Twist succeeded, as politics, religion and law could never do, in writing in the heart and soul what the Supreme Court could only write on the books.
Eldridge Cleaver

Movies can't ruin books. They can only ruin movies.
S. E. Hinton

My first two books are out of print and, okay, they can sleep there comfortably. It's early work, derivative work.
Mary Oliver

Any kid who has two parents who are interested in him and has a houseful of books isn't poor.
Sam Levenson

Most books today seemed to have been written overnight from books read the day before.
Nicolas de Chamfort