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1 " Do you arrange your books alphabetically? (I hope not.) "
― Mary Ann Shaffer , The Guernsey Literary and Potato Peel Pie Society
2 " Home is where your books are. "
― Kerstin Gier
3 " If your friend wishes to read your 'Plutarch's Lives,' 'Shakespeare,' or 'The Federalist Papers,' tell him gently but firmly, to buy a copy. You will lend him your car or your coat - but your books are as much a part of you as your head or your heart. "
― Mortimer J. Adler
4 " Imagine if you could dream about your books, read them in your dreams and learn them. You will never need to study in your life again. Just sleep. "
5 " Reese, your books might not tell you this, so I will. Every heart has two parts, the part that pumps and the part that loves. If you’re going to spend your life fixing broken hearts, then learn about both. You can’t just fix one with no concern for the other. "
6 " Write for joy. It is the *only* reason to write. Whatever happens to your books afterward, just write for joy. Send your current one out when it's done and forget it, start another, and keep on writing for joy. Words I now live by. Welwyn Wilton Katz "
― Welwyn Wilton Katz , The Third Magic
7 " Great leaders die empty. They live to offload everything they put in them! Don’t die with your books in your mind unpublished! "
― Israelmore Ayivor , Leaders' Watchwords
8 " Learning and knowing something is cool, but superb knowledge comes when you leave your books and become the inner world's friend. "
― Michael Bassey Johnson
9 " Yet Byron never made tea as you do, who fill the pot so that when you put the lid on the tea spills over. There is a brown pool on the table--it is running among your books and papers. Now you mop it up, clumsily, with your pocket-hankerchief. You then stuff your hankerchief back into your pocket--that is not Byron; that is so essentially you that if I think of you in twenty years' time, when we are both famous, gouty and intolerable, it will be by that scene: and if you are dead, I shall weep. "
― Virginia Woolf , The Waves
10 " You start wondering if you deserved those high reviews on your books or if people just pitied you and went “Poor sod. Here’s a five star review so you don’t hang yourself in the garage. "
11 " Being a famous writer is great. But there is a limit for it. For what extend can you be famous, and what would you achieve? True, your books will be best sellers, your blog writings and tweets will be hits, fans will love you, and what next? We all die to reach ‘there’ as budding writers, but once we reach ‘it’, we think, what next? Is this what we wanted all our lives? To grab all the leading awards, write best sellers, to be loved, to be known and heard? Will they help us achieve inner peace? I believe the utmost important thing is achieving inner peace, not money and fame. A writer should write to achieve inner peace forgetting all other things. Money, fame, fans are not going to last forever, but inner peace is. "
― Ama H. Vanniarachchy
12 " It's inhuman to take your books away before you know the end. "
― Katherine Rundell , The Wolf Wilder
13 " Being on Facebook as an Author and listing your books is like being a tiny single word in a giant dictionary! If people don’t search for you they don’t find you. They don’t take notice of you. They don’t even know you exist! Thats the hard reality of Socialmedia! "
― Lily Amis
14 " Whenever people ask me, " How are your books doing?" or, " How is your book doing?" I just say, " It's okay." I mean, what am I supposed to say? I'm a writer; that means I write because I need to write, because that's how I breathe and that's how I bleed. I'm not an author; I'm a writer. Even when I don't want to write; I can't stop! So, how are my books doing? The hell I know! The moment after I publish one book, I'm writing another one! I don't know how my books are doing! I just know that I'm writing them! I'm a writer, I'm a writer. I'm not an author. "
15 " There's a theme that appears in much of your work," I say to Maurice on my last visit to Connecticut, " and I can only hint at it because it's difficult to formulate or describe. It has something to do with the lines: 'As I went over the water/the water went over me' [from As I Went over the Water] or 'I'm in the milk and the milk's in me' [from Night Kitchen]." " Obviously I have one theme, and it's even in the book I'm working on right now. It's not that I have such original ideas, just that I'm good at doing variations on the same idea over and over again. You can't imagine how relieved I was to find out that Henry James admitted he had only a couple of themes and that all of his books were based on them. That's all we need as artists - one power-driven fantasy or obsession, then to be clever enough to do variations… like a series of variations by Mozart. They're so good that you forget they're based on one theme. The same things draw me, the same images…" " What is this one obsession?" " I'm not about to tell you - not because it's a secret, but because I can't verbalize it." " There's a line by Bob Dylan in 'Just Like a Woman' which talks about being 'inside the rain.'" " Inside the rain?" " When it's raining outside," I explain, " I often feel inside myself, as if I were inside the rain… as if the rain were my self. That's the sense I get from Dylan's image and from your books as well." " It's strange you say that," Maurice answers, " because rain has become one of the potent images of my new book. It sort of scares me that you mentioned that line. Maybe that's what rain means. It's such an important ingredient in this new work, and I've never understood what it meant. There was a thing about me and rain when I was a child: if I could summon it up in one sentence, I'd be happy to. It's such connected tissue… "
16 " People forget your face after a book tour or an infrequent appearance on Letterman, but put your face on your books and you're handing them your life. They presume to know what you think or who you are. "
― Katherine Reay , Dear Mr. Knightley
17 " Does it afflict you to find your books wearing out? I mean literally .. . the mortality of all inanimate things is terrible to me but that of books most of all. "
18 " You are not an " author," you are a writer. If your books are still selling like hotcakes ten years after your demise, THEN you're an author. "
19 " I don't think with any book you get used to people falling in love with the story. It's been incredible just to realize your books are being read. It's a pretty amazing feeling. "
20 " When you get frisked by the police at the age of 10, and they empty your schoolbag out in the street and kick your books around and calling you names because of where you live, you just get an anger towards everyone who is outside of your neighborhood. "