Doing it your own way, not having to go exactly by the book to be successful.
My problem is that I never get through the whole book. I skim through this one, that one, and then the other one.
It is shallow people who think beauty is frivolous or excessive. If you are bringing beauty and god, you are enriching the country. Rice feeds the body, books feed the mind, beauty feeds the soul. It is one thing I can really be proud of and stand tall in the world.
The existence of the Bible, as a book for the people, is the greatest benefit which the human race has ever experienced. Every attempt to belittle it is a crime against humanity.
A single line in the Bible has consoled me more than all the books I ever read besides.
Every book is the wreck of a perfect idea.
He had read much, if one considers his long life; but his contemplation was much more than his reading. He was wont to say that if he had read as much as other men he should have known no more than other men.
I don’t believe in personal immortality; the only way I expect to have some version of such a thing is through my books.
Any book worth banning is a book worth reading.
I have never written a book that didn’t teach me far more than it taught my reader.
When I feel difficulty coming on, I switch to another book I’m writing. When I get back to the problem, my unconscious has solved it.
Children read books, not reviews. They don’t give a hoot about critics.
When a day passes, it is no longer there. What remains of it? Nothing more than a story. If stories weren’t told or books weren’t written, man would live like the beasts, only for the day.
The Jewish people have been in exile for 2,000 years; they have lived in hundreds of countries, spoken hundreds of languages and still they kept their old language, Hebrew. They kept their Aramaic, later their Yiddish; they kept their books; they kept their faith.
In our time, when the literature for adults is deteriorating, good books for children are the only hope, the only refuge.
My Design in this Book is not to explain the Properties of Light by Hypotheses, but to propose and prove them by Reason and Experiments: In order to which, I shall premise the following Definitions and Axioms.
Heart is what drives us and determines our fate. That is what I need for my characters in my books: a passionate heart. I need mavericks, dissidents, adventurers, outsiders and rebels, who ask questions, bend the rules and take risks.
In my book tours I get to meet an audience every night. And I see that there are mostly young people, and there are a lot of more men than before, but always young, I don’t get older men. As I’m getting older, my audience gets younger!
A book is not an end in itself; it is only a way to touch someone – a bridge extended across a space of loneliness and obscurity – and sometimes it is a way of winning other people to our causes.
I don’t read thrillers, romance or mystery, and I don’t read self-help books because I don’t believe in shortcuts and loopholes.