Hugh Howey Quotes

Books are everywhere; and always the same sense of adventure fills us. Second-hand books are wild books, homeless books; they have come together in vast flocks of variegated feather, and have a charm which the domesticated volumes of the library lack. Besides, in this random miscellaneous company we may rub against some complete stranger who will, with luck, turn into the best friend we have in the world.

[D]on't ever apologize to an author for buying something in paperback, or taking it out from a library (that's what they're there for. Use your library). Don't apologize to this author for buying books second hand, or getting them from bookcrossing or borrowing a friend's copy. What's important to me is that people read the books and enjoy them, and that, at some point in there, the book was bought by someone. And that people who like things, tell other people. The most important thing is that people read.

The iPod is clearly a tipping point (and I'm not quite sure it is a wholly positive development), because it is a revolution in the way that we consume creative property, which I would call art. It has radically changed the relationship between the artist and the audience, how money changes hands, and how much money changes hands. Music was the first, and books are coming next. The Kindle or some form of electronic book is clearly inevitable, and it will massively reshape how books are sold, who pays for them, and how they're consumed. It is going to be really fascinating.

I can't pass a bookstore without slipping inside, looking for the next book that will burn my hand when I touch its jacket, or hand me over a promissory note of such immense power that it contains the formula that will change everything about me.

The big problem with literature is people tend to take the dialogue from the book, forgetting that everything that surrounds it is literate, therefore not knowing quite how to put that on screen.

A lot of times, when people send me books to read - new writers mostly - I find that the book is still in a draft stage and that before it can leave the writer's hands and head to a publisher, it needs about five more revisions. Some people don't want to do that.

Pat Robertson has written in a book a few years ago that we should have a world government, but only when the Messiah arrives. He wrote, literally, any attempt to achieve world order before that time must be the work of the Devil. Well join me - I’m glad to sit here at the right hand of Satan.

I always thought the joy of reading a book is not knowing what happens next. (Leonard Shelby, Memento)

To see Stephen Spender fumbling with our rich and delicate language is to experience all the horror of seeing a Sevres vase in the hands of a chimpanzee.

"Keep your hands to yourself!" might almost be put at the head of the first chapter of every book on etiquette.

I never go home and take out those business cards and go to those websites. But if there was a mini-comic here in my hand, I'd read it while I ate my lunch. I'm also probably one of the few remaining holdouts who hasn't consented to making the e-book versions of all my work, which is annoying to some of my publishers.

Books go out into the world, travel mysteriously from hand to hand, and somehow find their way to the people who need them at the times when they need them ... Cosmic forces guide such passings-along.

I know of one semibarbarous zone whose librarians repudiate the "vain and superstitious habit" of trying to find sense in books, equating such a quest with attempting to find meaning in dreams or in the chaotic lines on the palms of one's hand.

The book. Calming object. Held in the hand.

It seems like every ten years there's a book that says that poetry used to be popular, and now it's not, but we really have no way of knowing, in terms of relative size of audience and other things, exactly who readers were.

For all of my life it was the size of my rear that caused me the most hand-wringing, but in this nearly-50 zone it is my stomach that is the problem. It seems to have broken free from its moorings and there is no knowing how far it will roam.

A man who keeps a diary pays, Due toll to many tedious days; But life becomes eventful—then, His busy hand forgets the pen. Most books, indeed, are records less Of fulness than of emptiness.

I was never without a book in my hand.

When I take up a book I have read before, I know what to expect; the satisfaction is not lessened by being anticipated. I shake hands with, and look our old tried and valued friend in the face,--compare notes and chat the hour away.

Keep thy foot out of brothels, thy hand out of plackets, thy pen from lender's books, and defy the foul fiend.

You hope that people read your book and say "Yes, this is the way it is or could be." But then you have no way of knowing until the reader reads the book. Actually, the critical response doesn't worry me. I've had very few reviews that have upset me.

You humans, always eating. I'll make you soup. You can eat it while you keep working." Myrnin set aside his book and walked into the back of the lab. "Don't use the same beaker you used for poisons!" Claire yelled after him. He waved a pale hand. "I mean it!

With a book tucked in one hand, and a computer shoved under my elbow, I will march, not sidle, shudder or quake, into the twenty-first century.

I was raised among books, making invisible friends in pages that seemed cast from dust and whose smell I carry on my hands to this day.

You know I used to be the back porch poet with my book of lines, always hoping knowing all the time, I'm probably never gonna find the perfect rhyme. . .For heavier things