The lesson intended by an author is hardly ever the lesson the world chooses to learn from his book.
The fact is that the intrinsic worth of the book, play or whatever the author is trying to sell is the least, last factor in the the whole transaction.
Captain Shotover: How much does your soul eat? Ellie: Oh, a lot. It eats music and pictures and books and mountains and lakes and beautiful things to wear and nice people to be with.
A book is like a child: it is easier to bring it into the world than to control it when it is launched there.
People get nothing out of books but what they bring to them.
If you’re looking for self-help, why would you read a book written by somebody else?
Writing books isn’t a drastic departure from writing for the stage.
If you’re reading it in a book, folks, it ain’t self-help. It’s help.
Nothing you see on the Internet is mine unless it comes from one of my albums, books, HBO specials, or appeared on my website.
I recently bought a book of free verse. For twelve dollars.
No story is the same to us after a lapse of time; or rather we who read it are no longer the same interpreters.
I don’t want the world to give me anything for my books except money enough to save me from the temptation to write only for money.
Don’t judge a book by its cover.
Our instructed vagrancy, which has hardly time to linger by the hedgerows, but runs away early to the tropics, and is at home with palms and banyans – which is nourished on books of travel, and stretches the theatre of its imagination to the Zambesi.
It had already occurred to him that books were stuff, and that life was stupid.
Wise books For half the truths they hold are honored tombs.
With a single drop of ink for a mirror, the Egyptian sorcerer undertakes to reveal to any chance comer far-reaching visions of the past. This is what I undertake to do for you, reader.
My books don’t seem to belong to me after I have once written them; and I find myself delivering opinions about them as if I had nothing to do with them.
When you get me a good man made out of arguments, I will get you a good dinner with reading you the cookery book.
The fact is that certain themes cannot be celebrated in words, and tyranny is one of them. No one ever wrote a good book in praise of the Inquisition.