Books Quote by Mark Twain

“A book is a dead man, a sort of mummy, embowelled and embalmed, but that once had flesh, and motion, and a boundless variety…

— William Godwin

“The distinguished dead are clay in the hands of writers, and chance determines the shapes that their characters assume in the books written about…

— Janet Malcolm

“T[he rules of writing] require that the episodes in a tale shall be necessary parts of the tale, and shall help to develop it.”

— Mark Twain

“Each reader is but one chapter in the life of a book, and unless he passes his knowledge on to others, it is as…

— Alberto Manguel

“Authors only write what their characters tell them. Which mean we are scribes, and the characters are the author.”

— Anna-Cosette

“Death is but a tale we must all some day read.”

— William Grave

“As an author, I breathe life into each and every character within the stories that I write. But it is the reader who gives…

— Scott Borgman

“But where corpses were buried secretly, there the grass grows thick; such signs (and there are ever so many others!) may be read by…

— William T. Vollmann

“They say, dead men tell no tale, and yet, we live our lives based on dead men's tale.”

— Abhijit Naskar

“Imagine a place where the dead rest on shelves like books. Each body has a story to tell...”

— Victoria Schwab

“If these pages are thick with death, think of the battlefield. Corpses in different stages of decay, the slowly dying, moments of death exist…

— Susan Griffin

“For the narrative to exist, so that it could be read and reread even if I was taken away. Stories outlive their writers all…

— Jodi Picoult