Book Cover Quotes

“This time Simone did not smile at all.
"I cannot tell that to you, child. This is a
secret I am not allowed to talk about. I only hope that you will
know how to follow the true and right path. And now, farewell!" She
turned around and walked away between the bookshelves, disappearing
from their sight.
Nirupa looked at the book she held in her
hand. On its thick front cover she read:
"Atlantis."
Deep shudders shook her body. She turned her
head and looked at Miss Bell, who also looked numb with fear.
"Now that we have started the adventure, me
must carry it through to the end," Ni whispered to Miss Bell,
opening the book. She did not have time to see what was written
inside because, once the first page was open, a whirl of warm air
sucked Ni and Miss. Bell inside, In the twinkle of an eye they
found themselves standing up on the main street of a magnificent
bazaar.”

— Leora Cika Waldman

“Open a book this minute and start reading. Don't move until you've reached page fifty. Until you've buried your thoughts in print. Cover yourself with words. Wash yourself away. Dissolve.”

— Carol Shields

“A book cover is a distillation. It is a haiku of the story.”

— Chip Kidd

“Seeing your own name on the book cover is like hearing your book saying, Hi. Thanks for writing me!”

— Alvi Syahrin

“My grandad always said, "You should never judge a book by its cover." And it's for that reason that he lost his job as chair of the British Book Cover Awards panel.”

— Stewart Lee

“Don't write off a book (or person, or movie) just because it had a pink, sparkly cover.”

— Abby McDonald

“If a book cover has raised lettering, metallic lettering, or raised metallic lettering, then it is telling the reader: Hello. I am an easy-to-read work on espionage, romance, a celebrity, and/or murder. To readers who do not care for such things, this lettering tells them: Hello. I am crap.”

— Paul Collins

“When I started to draw, most of my influences were from other painters and illustrators, so I was drawing landscape at second hand, really. The trees were Rackham trees, or trees that I had seen in paintings rather than from my own observation ... and I started to feel this was a real lack in my work. Everything was too generalised, and not based on real experience. Then in 1975, after having worked for some years in London as a book cover illustrator mainly, I came down to Devon and stayed with some friends up on the moor. In the course of this one weekend, wandering around the moor, finding rivers and ancient woods, I realised that everything that I would ever want to draw was actually here. There was so much richness in the texture and forms of these fantastic trees ... and I decided in the course of that weekend to come and live here. I looked at a couple of houses, found one, and made an offer on it, all in that one weekend!”

— Alan Lee

“Never judge a book by its cover, especially when the book is a person, was the lesson.”

— Mary Higgins Clark

“But I felt as if I'd just been Photoshopped out of my own book cover. And if there was one thing I wasn't used to, it was being ignored”

— Rick Riordan

“I think life is a book," Eleanor said. "God writes it. We're His characters. He knows what happens on the next page, but we don't. Heaven is where we get to read the book cover to cover and see how it all makes sense.”

— Tiffany Reisz

“Aside from your name on the cover of the book, your voice should be your most distinctive signature.”

— Douglas Wilson

“I've been surprised at how much an unknown like myself can accomplish just by reaching out to people and pleading my case. Quotes for the book cover, reviews and interviews, readings and radio appearances - all this by simply moving ahead and making contact with folks I thought might enjoy the writing.”

— Patrick DeWitt

“I appreciate a book intended to be judged by its cover. The insincere readers are often weeded out while the sincere readers remain curious.”

— Criss Jami

“It was a fabulous outfit, but it was so urban-fantasy book cover.”

— Chloe Neill

“A bad book with a good cover is nothing but a wooden house with a golden door.”

— Mehmet Murat Ildan

“What a lovely display of personhood. He's like a good book cover that grabs your gaze. Read me. I'm fun but smart. You won't be able to put me down.”

— Laini Taylor

“Make your own dream.
That's the Beatles' story, isn't it? That's Yoko's story, that's what I'm saying now. Produce your own dream. If you want to save Peru, go save Peru. It's quite possible to do anything, but not to put it on the leaders and the parking meters. Don't expect Jimmy Carter or Ronald Reagan or John Lennon or Yoko Ono or Bob Dylan or Jesus Christ to come and do it for you. You have to do it yourself.
That's what the great masters and mistresses have been saying ever since time began. They can point the way, leave signposts and little instructions in various books that are now called holy and worshipped for the cover of the book and not for what it says, but the instructions are all there for all to see, have always been and always will be.
There's nothing new under the sun. All the roads lead to Rome. And people cannot provide it for you. I can't wake you up. You can wake you up. I can't cure you. You can cure you.”

— John Lennon

“On the table beside me is a book entitled Love's Desperate Desire. Based on the cover, I would have called it My Spectacular Washboard Abs.”

— Rick Yancey

“I still have a steady stream of book cover work. I'm grateful for it. Viva le book!”

— Chip Kidd

“I wouldn't buy a book simply because I like the cover. I would pick it up. The jacket can call your attention to it. But in that sense, Oprah Winfrey is worth all the jackets in the world. A jacket is basically trying to do what she does all on her own.”

— Chip Kidd

“If you've written a powerful book about a woman and your publisher then puts a 'feminine' image on the cover, it 'types' the book.”

— Meg Wolitzer

“What is written beneath this heavy handsome book cover will count, so sayeth this cover ...”

— Anne Rice

“Aaaand we have a winnerrrrr!" a man shouts into the mic in a singsong carnival voice as I lick the last of Patrick's ice cream from my fingers. "Pick out a prize for the beautiful girl."
"For you," Patrick says, kneeling in front of me with a moose in his outstretched hands.
I pull the stuffed animal to my chest. "Thank you. I shall love him always. I shall call him Holden Caulfield."
"From the book?"
"Yes, from the book. You were reading it when I saw you my first day here."
"You remember that?"
"It's one of my favorite books," I say.
"You were totally checking me out."
"Patrick! Not in front of Holden Caulfield!" I cover the moose's floppy ears with my hands, hoping neither he nor Patrick sees the red flooding my cheeks.”

— Sarah Ockler

“For the surf idol Duke Kahanamoku portrait, which I created for the Surfrider Foundation, I took a photo from a book cover and abstracted the photo image into a drawing. This drawing was laminated onto a surfboard and auctioned to a buyer.”

— John Van Hamersveld

“No matter how beautiful and loved a cover may be, the jury on it remains uncommitted until the book has been in the world for a while. Perhaps bookstore buyers will be indifferent. Perhaps it will be lost on store shelves. Perhaps there's another book or two out there using the same or a similar photo.”

— Nancy Werlin

“I was unwise enough to actually mention this in public a few times, and in fact to point out that there were two versions of the book now. One of them had somebody else's name on the cover, one had my name on the cover.”

— Jonathan Franzen

“The reader tries to uncover the skeleton that the book conceals. The author starts with the skeleton and tries to cover it up. His aim is to conceal the skeleton artistically or, in other words, to put flesh on the bare bones. If he is a good writer, he does not bury a puny skeleton under a mass of fat; on the other hand, neither should the flesh be too thin, so that the bones show through. If the flesh is thick enough, and if the flabbiness is avoided, the joints will be detectable and the motion of the parts will reveal the articulation.”

— Mortimer J. Adler

“Aureliano Segundo was deep in the reading of a book. Although it had no cover and the title did not appear anywhere, the boy enjoyed the story of a woman who sat at a table and ate nothing but kernels of rice, which she picked up with a pin, and the story of the fisherman who borrowed a weight for his net from a neighbor and when he gave him a fish in payment later it had a diamond in its stomach, and the one about the lamp that fulfilled wishes and about flying carpets. Surprised, he asked Ursula if all that was true and she answered him that it was, that many years ago the gypsies had brought magic lamps and flying mats to Macondo.
"What's happening," she sighed, "is that the world is slowly coming to an end and those things don't come here any more.”

— Gabriel Jose Garcia Marquez

“When I was 10 years old, I loved - I loved books, and I used to haunt the secondhand bookshop. And I found a little book I could just afford, and I bought it, and I took it home. And I climbed up my favorite tree, and I read that book from cover to cover. And that was Tarzan of the Apes. I immediately fell in love with Tarzan.”

— Jane Goodall

“It was her first book, an indigo cover with a silver moonflower, an art nouveau flower, I traced my finger along the silver line like smoke, whiplash curves ... I touched the pages her hands touched, I pressed them to my lips, the soft thick old paper, yellow now, fragile as skin. I stuck my nose between the bindings and smelled all the readings she had given, the smell of unfiltered cigarettes and the espresso machine, beaches and incense and whispered words in the night. I could hear her voice rising from the pages. The cover curled outward like sails.”

— Janet Fitch

“Instead, I practiced different forms of reading. The possibilities offered by books are legion. The solitary relationship of a reader with his or her books breaks into dozens of further relationships: with friends upon whom we urge the books we like, with booksellers (the few who have survived in the Age of Supermarkets) who suggest new titles, with strangers for whom we might compile an anthology. As we read and reread over the years, these activities multiply and echo one another. A book we loved in our youth is suddenly recalled by someone to whom it was long ago recommended, the reissue of a book we thought forgotten makes it again new to our eyes, a story read in one context becomes a different story under a different cover. Books enjoy this modest kind of immortality.”

— Alberto Manguel

“For obvious reasons, I never told you about my notebook, with a cover as green as mansions long ago, which I use as a commonplace book, a phrase which here means 'place where I have collected passages from some of the most important books I have read.”

— Lemony Snicket

“This would be ... a book that would be a trapdoor down into some place dark. A place only you could go, alone, when you opened the cover. Because only books have that power.”

— Chuck Palahniuk

“If I pick up a book with spaceships on the cover, I want spaceships. If I see one with dragons, I want there to be dragons inside the book. Proper labeling. Ethical labeling. I don't want to open up my cornflakes and find that they're full of pebbles ... You need to respect the reader enough not to call it something it isn't.”

— Margaret Atwood

“I had a love affair with books, with characters and their words. Books kept me company. When the voices of the book faded, as with the last long chord of a record, the back cover crinkling closed, I could swear I heard a door click shut.”

— Marya Hornbacher

“[ ... ]he also had a device which looked rather like a largish electronic calculator. This had about a hundred tiny flat press buttons and a screen about four inches square on which any one of a million "pages" could be summoned at a moment's notice. It looked
insanely complicated, and this was one of the reasons why the snug plastic cover it fitted into had the words
Don't Panic printed on it in large friendly letters. The other reason was that this device was in fact that most
remarkable of all books ever to come out of the great publishing corporations of Ursa Minor - The Hitch Hiker's Guide to the Galaxy. The reason why it was published in the form of a micro sub meson electronic component is that if it were printed in normal book form, an interstellar hitch hiker would require several inconveniently large buildings to carry it around in.”

— Douglas Adams

“Men may consider a female like a book and try judging her by the cover but she is not the book but the author of the destiny of mankind.”

— Amit Abraham

“Can I ask what you're reading?" ... She turned the book so the cover faced me. Wuthering Heights. "Have you read it?" She said. I nodded. I could feel the pulsating beat of my heart behind my eyes. "It's a sad story." "Sad stories make good books," She said. "They do.”

— Khaled Hosseini

“There's no way you're going to get a quote from us to use on your book cover - Metropolitan Police Spokesperson”

— Banksy

“Covers matter. In my experience, a different cover can make you think you're reading an entirely different book.”

— Gabrielle Zevin

“People are going to wonder why you're trying to be different; it's just a natural instinct. If I was to walk down the street in a kilt, then dudes would wonder why I'm doing that, they'd think I was different or gay. It's natural for people to point fingers. That's my whole reason for trying to switch things up; don't judge a book by it's cover.”

— Kid Cudi

“In my book "Sound Unbound" we traced the guy who actually came up with the main concept for the graphic design of the record cover sleeve. His name is Alex Steinweiss. And one of the things in my book that we really tried to figure out was the revolution in graphic design that occurred when people put images on album covers.”

— DJ Spooky

“I loved the book [The Adderall Diaries] I optioned it, I think some years ago. But there's a lot of different threads in the book. It starts off as one thing, where he's trying to cover this murder trial, and then his own life starts to impinge on that, so it becomes something else. I found that fascinating.”

— James Franco

“Don't judge a book by its cover 'til you've read the book.”

— Jamie Lee Curtis

“Book cover, 'Reefer Club' Totalitarianism is when people believe they can punish their way to perfection.”

— Newt Gingrich

“[I did] Some [reading to prep for Expelled]. I read one book cover to cover, From Darwin to Hitler , and that was a very interesting book
one of these rare books I wish had been even longer. It's about how Darwin 's theory
supposedly concocted by this mild-mannered saintly man, with a flowing white beard like Santa Claus
led to the murder of millions of innocent people.”

— Ben Stein

“Miramar, my recording company, has decided to offer a compilation of my music for snowboarding, which will have the same cover as the book does.”

— Frederick Lenz