Pastoral Resources

People in my books tend to get their just deserts, even if not at the hands of the police.

The concentration in my book on Marie Antoinette's childhood and on her family influences. It is surprising how some books actually start with her arrival in France!

My books are water; those of the great geniuses are wine - everybody drinks water.

What progress we are making. In the Middle Ages they would have burned me. Now they are content with burning my books.

These days, there are many people around the world who listen to the songs that made me infamous and read the books that made me respectable.

I am a writer of books in retrospect. I talk in order to understand; I teach in order to learn.

I've always had great respect for Paddington because he is amusingly English and eccentric. He is a great British institution and my generation grew up with the books and then Michael Horden's animations.

I don't think any good book is based on factual experience. Bad books are about things the writer already knew before he wrote them.

Learning hath gained most by those books by which the printers have lost.

Every reader knows about the feeling that characters in books seem more real than real people.

Second, there are so many magical places in books that you can't go to, like Hogwarts and Middle Earth, so I wanted to set a story in a place where children can actually go.

Oh, I think every author is inspired by all of the books that she reads.

I will try to write books until I drop dead.

I always thought it hadn't influenced me very much, but I heard from many people from England that many motives from German fairytales are to be found in my books.

I basically only read books that are over 2,000 years old.

How some of the writers I come across get through their books without dying of boredom is beyond me.

A bad book is the worse that it cannot repent. It has not been the devil's policy to keep the masses of mankind in ignorance; but finding that they will read, he is doing all in his power to poison their books.

We do not need to proselytise either by our speech or by our writing. We can only do so really with our lives. Let our lives be open books for all to study.

I don't think that Slaughterhouse-Five was successful movie material. In fact, Vonnegut's books mostly I don't feel are movie material.

My office has been one of the most scrupulous in the country with regard to the protection of individual rights. I've been on record for years in law journals and books as championing the rights of the individual against the oppressive power of the state.