Voltaire Quotes

Really important books to me are the classics. I try very hard to read them well - you know, especially once I got serious about writing. So, reading Tolstoy several times - 'War and Peace,' 'The Kreutzer Sonata' - all those were really important to me.

If I had to name one book that has had the most lasting influence on my work, I would pick 'The Big Sea' by Langston Hughes.

The book I always say that influenced me, subconsciously, because at the time I didn't know I wanted to be a writer, was William Goldman's 'Marathon Man.' That was the first adult thriller that I loved. I read it when I was 15 or so, when my father gave it to me.

Like most writers, I've read a lot of Hemingway, and I admire him greatly.

In some ways, certain books are more powerful by far than any battle.

Well, Bradbury's a genius. Fahrenheit 451 is one of my favorite books of all time, and The Illustrated Man as a collection of short stories ranks up there. When you read it you realize how influential it is on so many other stories and people.

Nay, it's not the Devil been leading her astray. It's books! That girl has been nothing but trouble ever since she learned how to read.

One should never underestimate the power of books.

Everything which is good in me should be credited to books.

My father gave me free run of his library. When I think of my boyhood, I think in terms of the books I read.

The book was in her lap; she had read no further. The power to change one’s life comes from a paragraph, a lone remark. The lines that penetrate us are slender, like the flukes that live in river water and enter the bodies of swimmers. She was excited, filled with strength. The polished sentences had arrived, it seemed, like so many other things, at just the right time. How can we imagine what our lives should be without the illumination of the lives of others?

I have stolen ideas from every book I have ever read.

Books have always been really important to me; they're my saving grace.

Books swept me away, this way and that, one after the other; I made endless vows according to their lights for I believed them.

Generally speaking, men are influenced by books which clarify their own thought, which express their own notions well, or which suggest to them ideas which their minds are already predisposed to accept

I owe everything I am and everything I will ever be to books.

Books have always been important to me - my mom was a first grade teacher, so I grew up reading all the time.

Growing up, I took so many cues from books. They taught me most of what I knew about what people did, about how to behave. They were my teachers and my advisers.

Who were my mentors in poetry and literature? This is a matter of opinion. Some see in my books the influences of authors whose names, in my ignorance, I have not even heard, while others see the influences of poets whose names I have heard but whose writings I have not read. And what is my opinion? From whom did I receive nurture? Not every man remembers the name of the cow which supplied him with each drop of milk he has drunk.

My life has been greatly influenced by many books which I have never read.

Mankind are creatures of books, as well as of other circumstances; and such they eternally remain,--proofs, that the race is a noble and believing race, and capable of whatever books can stimulate.

Next to the originator of a good sentence is the first quoter of it. Many will read the book before one thinks of quoting a passage. As soon as he has done this, that line will be quoted east and west.

I think I created my particular stage persona out of my dad's life. And perhaps I even built it to suit him to some degree. I was looking for - when I was looking for a voice to mix with my voice, I put on my father's work clothes, as I say in the book, and I went to work.

I don't know what Douglas Coupland thinks about his writing. I've read maybe one page of one of his books and didn't think I was similar to him. But it seems like people just compare you to anyone, pretty much.

I do not know if Alice in Wonderland was an original story-I was, at least, no conscious imitator in writing it-but I do know that, since it came out, something like a dozen story-books have appeared, on identically the same pattern. The path I timidly explored believing myself to be 'the first that ever burst into that silent sea'-is now a beaten high-road: all the way-side flowers have long ago been trampled into the dust: and it would be courting disaster for me to attempt that style again.