Quotes About Books

If you spend all your time reading books that you only pretend to understand, year after year, there isn't much room for anything else.

I tend to mostly take the day off from working on Sundays, but I do spend some time reading. Mostly what I'm picking up is what's in stores. I really do love to read fiction from the last year or two.

While in the middle of writing a book, I have a hard time reading other books for pleasure.

Look at anyone's bookcase at home, no matter how modest, and you're going to find a book that contains wisdom or ideas or a language that's at least a thousand years old. And the idea that humans have created a mechanism to time travel, to hurl ideas into the future, it sort of bookends. Books are a time machine.

It's going to be labor-intensive and time-consuming, but you need to take all the books down and put them on the floor. Take them down and spread them in one area. Physically pick each book up, one by one. If the book inspires you, keep it. If not, it goes out. That's the standard by which you decide.

I think there's a responsibility of the publisher, of the company, to make sure the staple books that have been around for decades come out in a timely manner.

Censorship is a strange situation. There was times when people would burn books because they didn't like what people were doing.

I think it was in sixth grade, though, when I picked up my first Stephen King book, which was 'It,' that knocked me over and terrified me for years. Then I never went back. I had to own every Stephen King book and read them at least three times. They would terrify me completely, but I couldn't stop. That became my preferred source of fiction.

I was a kid who loved to read. I read everything I could get my hands on. I didn't have one favorite book. I had lots of favorite books: 'The Borrowers' by Mary Norton, 'Paddington' by Michael Bond, 'A Little Princess' by Frances Hodgson Burnett, 'Stuart Little' by EB White, 'A Cricket in Times Square,' all the Beverly Cleary books.

The publishing world is very timid. Readers are much braver.

Fiction writing, and the reading of it, and book buying, have always been the activities of a tiny minority of people, even in the most-literate societies.

Endnotes, often confused with footnotes that live at the bottom of a page, is that lump of text at the end of the book, sometimes even relegated to a tiny font size. They're often forgotten but, in nonfiction, particularly history books, can offer a fascinating footprint into the author's research, a joyful, geeky abyss.

These are just the tip of the iceberg, because I read and read and read. I read everything.

I always try to read at night, because it gets me kind of tired.

It's true, too, that I'm tired of using books as political bullets and grenades. Books are too precious and wonderful to be used for long in such a fashion.

I get very tired of violence in crime fiction. Maybe it is what life is like, but I don't want to do it in my books.

I get very tired of books that feel emotionally empty. I would much rather have writers err on the side of being overly sentimental than not. I think that the perfect balance is a story that moves you without being maudlin, but I don't enjoy books that are empty of emotion and there's no connection to the characters.

I got into history when I was 11 years old, and it all started with the Titanic. I'd read books in the library about it. Of course I've seen the movie, too - I don't think I've ever cried that much.

Everywhere I go, the kids call me 'the book lady.' The older I get, the more appreciative I seem to be of the 'book lady' title. It makes me feel more like a legitimate person, not just a singer or an entertainer. But it makes me feel like I've done something good with my life and with my success.

Many books have changed my life, but only one has the word 'life-changing' in the title: Marie Kondo's 'The Life-Changing Magic of Tidying.'

Next, in importance to books are their titles.

For someone who loves literature, and all books on principle, being asked to name three titles over a half century of serious reading is akin to asking one to recall their three favorite sunsets.

I hope for so much from every book I read. And time and again, I find myself disappointed. I look across my bookshelves and see hundreds of titles which in my memory seem merely mediocre or second-rate. Only occasionally does a novel appear for which I feel a lasting passion, a book that I think could in time become a classic.

I have a hard time recalling the titles of books.