Ava Gardner Quotes

You write a book like that you're fond of over the years, then you see that happen to it, it's like pissing in your father's beer.

I hate to lend a book I love...it never seems quite the same when it comes back to me.

I am a complete sentimentalist when it comes to clothes. I have so many memories attached to them that I can't throw anything out.

I don't like to sell my finest pieces.

People's most prized possessions carry deeply symbolic and emotional significance.

Writing a book I have found to be like building a house. A man forms a plan, and collects materials.

A really good day for me is to write my book for about four hours, go to the writing room for about four hours and then maybe come back to the book to finish the day for a few more hours of it.

I feel as if when you love a book it becomes a part of you whether you have it on your shelves or not.

Have more than one idea on the go at any one time. If it's a choice between writing a book and doing nothing I will always choose the latter. It's only if I have an idea for two books that I choose one rather than the other. I ­always have to feel that I'm bunking off from something.

The dearer a book was to my heart, the more battered and bruised it became.

There was no "decision" per se to re-position myself. I simply decided that I wanted to write a book that would help people influence others.

Borrow my umbrellas, my clothes, my money, and I will likely not think of them again. But borrow my books and I will be on your track like a bloodhound until they are returned.

In the futile attempts we all make to tidy up our lives and our surroundings, nothing is more difficult than throwing out a book.

A lot of being a writer doesn't have anything to do with writing. It's ironic - I have to squeeze the books in, even though that's what it's all about.

[Children] would have messed up my apartment. In the main, they are ungrateful. They would have siphoned too much time away from the writing of my precious books.

When we finish a book, why do we hold it in both hands and gaze at it as if it were somehow alive?

Perhaps when we're forced to forfeit what we own, we lose any sentimental associations. Perhaps pawning our valuables frees us in the same way a house fire destroys not only our worldly goods, but our attachment to what's gone.

I very much love a physical book myself. I think people who have had this experience of also seeing a book come together, from sitting down and writing the first word, to holding the binding in your hand, we have a deeper sentimental attachment to it than others might.

When I am so intensely involved with writing my books I don't like to reread them.

For most of my life, when I've finished the book I'm writing, there've always been as many as two or three other novels waiting to be written next. And the decision driving which one of them it should be was never based on how long it had waited or how many accumulated pages of notes I had.

In the loss of an object we do not proportion our grief to the real value it bears, but to the value our fancies set upon it.

The girl or the world, you see someone gotta lose. I thought I could have it all, do I really gotta choose?

Children's book writers tend to feel quite superior, and adult writers tend to feel they wouldn't know how to write a children's book - which might surprise you because I think a lot of people think it's the other way around.

If you write a page a day in couple months you have a good chunk of the book and then after a year you have almost a book. It's not that...hard.

Effective leaders sacrifice much that is good in order to dedicate themselves to what is best