I never write a book unless I can’t help it. Something has to bother me, like a mosquito, until I have to do something to relieve the itch. – Gregory Maguire
Maybe this is pathetic, but I still dread producing a book that doesn’t earn back its advance. I hate obligations that are financially foggy. – Helen Garner
The book to read is not the one which thinks for you, but the one which makes you think. No book in the world equals the Bible for that. – Harper Lee
After I graduated in Vancouver, I had been working on a book about war-affected children and land mines with the foreign minister – he was working at a place on campus and hired me. I then got a job as a Human Rights and Refugees Officer in London, and I loved working there. – Hannah Simone
Digital organisms, while not necessarily any more alive than a phone book, are strings of code that replicate and evolve over time. Digital codes are strings of binary digits – bits. – George Dyson
It was actually a very nice little book done by a gift book company. They illustrated it with pictures from 1920s football, before there were face guards. – Gregg Easterbrook
Dennis the Menace was probably the most realistic comic book ever done. No space aliens ever invaded! – Gilbert Hernandez
I remember that I used to get lots of books from the library, and ‘Little Women’ was one of them. And I used to just cross out the parts of it that really upset me because it’s such a sad book in so many ways. I’d cross out the parts that upset me, and I would rewrite new endings. – Helen Oyeyemi
I saw Roland Barthes’s ‘Mourning Diary’ at a bookshop, and I felt it was like I was destined to see the book. I read it all in one go while I was in the shop. The book was mind-blowing. – Go Ah-sung
We really tried hard not to make it a cricket book, it appeals to a much wider community. – Hansie Cronje
I had expected that at some point during the first draft a light would go on, and I would understand, finally, how to write a book. This never happened. The process was akin to blindly walking in the dark, feeling my way only by touch, and only recognising dead ends when I smacked into them. – Hannah Kent
There’s something nice and intimate about having a book. You know that someone’s actually gone on this journey. You know that someone has actually researched and reported all these things. You can see and hear their tone in what they chosen to include and what they haven’t. – Hanya Yanagihara
I think there’s a reason that horror appeals to teens. There’s a lot of useful lessons to take away from reading horror. We get to be scared in the comfort and safety of our own homes. We can put the book down if we get too scared, and no one will ever know if we decide not to pick it up again. – Holly Black
The older I get, the more my curiosity grows, and every book I write is a new exploration. – Gillian Cross
I am being frank about myself in this book. I tell of my first mistake on page 850. – Henry Kissinger
I just like the comic book sensibility. If I can turn them into films and TV series, that’s just icing on the cake. – Gale Anne Hurd
The first book I ever really read was Plato’s ‘Republic,’ and then I had to go over that five times or something. – Huey Newton
A book is good company. It is full of conversation without loquacity. It comes to your longing with full instruction, but pursues you never. – Henry Ward Beecher
I like to read and dream and create music that is based on the imagery of text. If you have the combination of a great book and a great filmmaker, what could be better for the composer? – Howard Shore
I’ve never tried to pass myself off as anything more than a comedian who wrote a dating book. – Greg Behrendt
I never abandoned either forms or freedom. I imagine that most of what could be called free verse is in my first book. I got through that fairly early. – Howard Nemerov
Child! Do not throw this book about; refrain from the unholy pleasure of cutting all the pictures out. – Hilaire Belloc
When we talk about good books, we often talk about good sentences, but what we rarely talk about is reader pleasure. Yet it is reader pleasure that is going to make a book break out into the kind of success that makes it into a household name. – Holly Black
If you take a book of a thousand pages on the Second World War, in which 50 million people died, the concentration camps occupy two pages and the gas chambers ten or 15 lines, and that’s what one calls a detail. – Jean-Marie Le Pen
I try to do a lot of asymmetrical, triangular compositions – I find those work really well for comic book covers in that portrait mode, and I don’t always see that in other artists. – Jim Lee
Quite often I can be in a bookshop, standing beneath a great big picture of myself and paying for a book with a credit card clearly marked John Grisham, yet no one recognises me. I often say I’m a famous author in a country where no one reads. – John Grisham