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Life without literature is a life reduced to penury. (M. H. Abrams)
There must be a secret hidden in this book or else you wouldn't bother to read it. (Kathy Acker)
Be not content with the best book; seek sidelights from the others; have no favourites. (Lord Acton)
In the case of good books, the point is not to see how many of them you can get through, but how many can get through to you. (Mortimer J. Adler)
You can't control what's going to happen to the book you're about to publish. (Rumaan Alam)
Books are the true means of acquiring talent, for if one does not read one remains ignorant, and ignorance can never produce true painters. (Francesco Albani)
Books that have become classics - books that have had their day and now get more praise than perusal - always remind me of retired colonels and majors and captains who, having reached the age limit, find themselves retired on half pay. (Thomas Bailey Aldrich)
I really like books that you can kind of hear as much as think about, that are so graphic and visual. (Laurie Anderson)
Beware of the person of one book. (St. Thomas Aquinas)
Yes, I read. I have that absurd habit. I like beautiful poems, moving poetry, and all the beyond of that poetry. I am extraordinarily sensitive to those poor, marvelous words left in our dark night by a few men I never knew. (Louis Aragon)
The reason I love comics more than anything else is that the longest story will be just a few pages. With a novel, it takes so many pages to get to one thing happening. (Sergio Aragones)
Once you publish a book, it is out of your control. You cannot dictate how people read it. (Margaret Atwood)
Some books are undeservedly forgotten; none are undeservedly remembered. (W. H. Auden)
A real book is not one that we read, but one that reads us. (W. H. Auden)
Literary imagination is an aesthetic object offered by a writer to a lover of books. (Gaston Bachelard)
Some books are to be tasted, others to be swallowed, and some few to be chewed and digested. (Sir Francis Bacon)
I like shelves full of books in a library, but if all books become electronic, the task of big research libraries remains the same - keep what's published in the form in which it appeared. (Nicholson Baker)
Printed books usually outlive bookstores and the publishers who brought them out. They sit around, demanding nothing, for decades. That's one of their nicest qualities - their brute persistence. (Nicholson Baker)
Books: a beautifully browsable invention that needs no electricity and exists in a readable form no matter what happens. (Nicholson Baker)
The birth of the reader must be at the cost of the death of the Author. (Roland Barthes)
A book is a garden, an orchard, a storehouse, a party, a company by the way, a counselor, a multitude of counselors. (Charles Baudelaire)
People really want to think that these things really happened. I don't know why that is important, but I know that when I finish reading a novel or something, I want to know how much of that really happened to this author. (Alison Bechdel)
Books are not made for furniture, but there is nothing else that so beautifully furnishes a house. (Henry Ward Beecher)
People can lose their lives in libraries. They ought to be warned. (Saul Bellow)
Books are not men and yet they stay alive. (Stephen Vincent Benet)
All impassioned bookmen, except a few who devote their whole lives to reading, have rows of books on their shelves which they have never read, and which they never will read. I know that I have hundreds such. (Arnold Bennett)
Books are the compasses and telescopes and sextants and charts which other men have prepared to help us navigate the dangerous seas of human life. (Jesse Lee Bennett)
Who learns most from a good book is the author. (Jose Bergamin)
When we read a story, we inhabit it. The covers of the book are like a roof and four walls. What is to happen next will take place within the four walls of the story. And this is possible because the story's voice makes everything its own. (John Berger)
-one-sentence book review...
The covers of this book are too far apart. (Ambrose Bierce)
novel, n. A short story padded. A species of composition bearing the same relation to literature that the panorama bears to art. (Ambrose Bierce)
The failure to read good books both enfeebles the vision and strengthens our most fatal tendency – the belief that the here and now is all there is. (Allan Bloom)
Books! I dunno if I ever told you this, but books are the greatest gift one person can give another. (Bono)
A wonderful thing about a book, in contrast to a computer screen, is that you can take it to bed with you. (Daniel J. Boorstin)
- Poem of the Gifts, 1959 (trans. by Alastair Reid)...
I had always thought of Paradise / In form and image as a library. (Jorge Luis Borges)
Don't you love the Oxford Dictionary? When I first read it, I thought it was a really really long poem about everything. (David Bowie)
There are worse crimes than burning books. One of them is not reading them. (Ray Bradbury)
Without libraries what have we? We have no past and no future. (Ray Bradbury)
You've got to love libraries. You've got to love books. You've got to love poetry. You've got to love everything about literature. Then, you can pick the one thing you love most and write about it. (Ray Bradbury)
A book has got smell. A new book smells great. An old book smells even better. An old book smells like ancient Egypt. (Ray Bradbury)
In your reading, find books to improve your color sense, your sense of shape and size in the world. (Ray Bradbury)
Hungry man, reach for the book: it is a weapon. (Bertolt Brecht)
Books have been my classroom and my confidant. Books have widened my horizons. Books have comforted me in my hardest times. Books have changed my life. (Po Bronson)
I think when a reader reads a whole book - which takes six to ten hours - that's kind of a gift to the author. The gift of close, undivided attention. To who else do we listen so closely for eight straight hours? And when readers give that gift to me, I'm grateful for it. (Po Bronson)
The lessons taught in great books are misleading. The commerce in life is rarely so simple and never so just. (Anita Brookner)
I suppose what one wants really is ideal company and books are ideal company. (Anita Brookner)
Until it is kindled by a spirit as flamingly alive as the one which gave it birth, a book is dead to us. Words divested of their magic are but dead hieroglyphs. (H. Jackson Brown, Jr.)
I do, indeed, close my door at times and surrender myself to a book, but only because I can open the door again and see a human face looking at me. (Martin Buber)
The most important thing about writing a book is having book parties. (Art Buchwald)
Without literature, life is hell. (Charles Bukowski)
Books are but waste paper unless we spend in action the wisdom we get from thought. (Edward G. Bulwer-Lytton)
In science, read, by preference, the newest works; in literature, the oldest. The classic literature is always modern. (Edward G. Bulwer-Lytton)
Master books, but do not let them master you. Read to live, not live to read. (Edward G. Bulwer-Lytton)
The possession of a book becomes a substitute for reading it. (Anthony Burgess)
The adult relation to books is one of absorbing rather than being absorbed. (Anthony Burgess)
To read without reflecting is like eating without digesting. (Edmund Burke)
One of the great things about books is sometimes there are some fantastic pictures. (George W. Bush)
I reads every chance I can gets. (George W. Bush)
The power of a book lies in its power to turn a solitary act into a shared vision. As long as we have books, we are not alone. (Laura Bush)
Books are like imprisoned souls till someone takes them down from a shelf and frees them. (Samuel Butler, novelist)
The oldest books are only just out to those who have not read them. (Samuel Butler, novelist)
A classic is a book that has never finished saying what it has to say. (Italo Calvino)
No book that will not improve by repeated readings deserves to be read at all. (Thomas Carlyle)
A good book is the purest essence of a human soul. (Thomas Carlyle)
The Louvre is the book in which we learn to read. (Paul Cezanne)
The success of many books is due to the affinity between the mediocrity of the author's ideas and those of the public. (Sebastien-Roch Nicolas de Chamfort)
If my books had been any worse I should not have been invited to Hollywood, and if they had been any better I should not have come. (Raymond Chandler)
When a book, any sort of book, reaches a certain intensity of artistic performance it becomes literature. (Raymond Chandler)
It is chiefly through books that we enjoy intercourse with the superior minds, and these invaluable means of communication are in reach of all. In the best books, great men talk to us, give us their most precious thoughts, and pour their souls into ours. God be thanked for books. They are the voices of the distant and the dead, and make us heirs of the spiritual life of past ages. Books are true levellers. They give to all, who faithfully use them, the society, the spiritual presence of the best and greatest of our race. (William Ellery Channing)
There are more valid facts and details in works of art than there are in history books. (Charlie Chaplin)
-paraphrased...
Go, little book, go, little mine tragedy. (Geoffrey Chaucer)
A good novel tells us the truth about its hero; but a bad novel tells us the truth about its author. (G. K. Chesterton)
The most valuable book we can read, about countries we have visited, is that which recalls to us something that we did notice, but did not notice that we noticed. (G. K. Chesterton)
Happy is he who has laid up in his youth, and held fast in all fortune, a genuine and passionate love for reading. (Rufus Choate)
Anyone who has a book collection wants for nothing. (Cicero)
A room without books is like a body without a soul. (Cicero)
It would be unfair to say that I prefer the back of a book to its contents, but it is true that the sight of a lot of books gives me the hope that I may some day read them, which sometimes develops into the belief that I have read them. (Sir Kenneth Clark)
I went to the library. They gave you books for nothing. You had to bring them back, but when you did, they let you take others. (Barbara Cohen)
Books, books, books. It was not that I read so much. I read and re-read the same ones. But all of them were necessary to me. Their presence, their smell, the letters of their titles, and the texture of their leather bindings. (Sidonie Gabrielle Colette)
Many books require no thought from those who read them, and for a very simple reason – they made no such demand upon those who wrote them. (Charles Caleb Colton)
I have this theory that it is the dream of most educated people to own/work in a bookstore. (Megan Coughlin)
Never loan a book to someone if you expect to get it back. Loaning books is the same as giving them away. (Doug Coupland)
Keep in mind that books, like art museums, are not always geared to the desires of the reader. (Tyler Cowen)
A good book has no ending. (R. D. Cumming)
The rules have changed. True power is held by the person who possesses the largest bookshelf, not gun cabinet or wallet. (Anthony J. D'Angelo)
So, please, oh please, we beg, we pray, go throw your TV set away, and in its place you can install, a lovely bookcase on the wall. (Roald Dahl)
I have read novels that have made me a better man; I have also read novels that made me wish the author were a better man. (Dennis Danvers)
The book is true, and if evidence seems to contradict it, it is the evidence that must be thrown out, not the book. (Richard Dawkins)
The reading of all good books is like conversation with the finest men of the centuries past. (Rene Descartes)
There are books of which the backs and covers are by far the best parts. (Charles Dickens)
There is no frigate like a book. (Emily Dickinson)
A book, like a landscape, is a state of consciousness varying with readers. (Ernest Dimnet)
A book may be as great a thing as a battle. (Benjamin Disraeli)
When I want to read a good book, I write one. (Benjamin Disraeli)
Not as ours the books of old - / Things that steam can stamp and fold; / Not as ours the books of yore - / Rows of type, and nothing more. (Austin Dobson)
I can walk into a bookstore and hand over my credit card and they don't know who the hell I am. Maybe that says something about bookstore clerks. (E. L. Doctorow)
-on Shakespeare...
He was naturally learned; he needed not the spectacles of books to read nature; he looked inwards, and found her there. (John Dryden)
Let's be reasonable and add an eighth day to the week that is devoted exclusively to reading. (Lena Dunham)
Let this book take you to the stars and beyond. (Lena Dunham)
Never judge a book by its movie. (J. W. Eagan)
An honest bookstore would post the following sign above its 'self-help' section: 'For true self-help, please visit our philosophy, literature, history and science sections. Find yourself a good book, read it, and think about it. (Roger Ebert)
Of making many books there is no end; and much study is a weariness of the flesh. (Ecclesiastes)
We should be as careful of the books we read, as of the company we keep. The dead very often have more power than the living. (Tryon Edwards)
Reading, after a certain age, diverts the mind too much from its creative pursuits. Any man who reads too much and uses his own brain too little falls into lazy habits of thinking. (Albert Einstein)
What I have to say about this book can be found inside the book. (Albert Einstein)
Books are the quietest and most constant of friends; they are the most accessible and wisest of counsellors, and the most patient of teachers. (Charles W. Eliot)
Books are the quietest and most constant of friends and the most patient of teachers. (Charles W. Eliot)
It is certain that a book is not harmless merely because no one is consciously offended by it. (T. S. Eliot)
Books are the beehives of thought; laconics the honey taken from them. (James Ellis)
Some books leave us free and some books make us free. (Ralph Waldo Emerson)
In the highest civilization, the book is still the highest delight. He who has once known its satisfactions is provided with a resource against calamity. (Ralph Waldo Emerson)
So much of what I see reminds me of something I read in a book, when shouldn't it be the other way around? (Nora Ephron)
Your library is your paradise. (Desiderius Erasmus)
When I get a little money, I buy books; if any is left, I buy food and clothes. (Desiderius Erasmus)
- Books and Islands in Ojibwe Country...
I can't imagine a home without an overflow of books. The point of books is to have way too many but to always feel you never have enough, or the right one at the right moment, but then sometimes to find you'd longed to fall asleep reading the Aspern Papers, and there it is. (Louise Erdrich)
I think, especially when you're in college, each book that you're reading tends to tell you who you are. (Jeffrey Eugenides)
When you reread a classic you do not see more in the book than you did before; you see more in you than there was before. (Clifton Fadiman)
Books are not rolls, to be devoured only when they are hot and fresh. A good book retains its interior heat and will warm a generation yet unborn. (Clifton Fadiman)
Books open your mind, broaden your mind, and strengthen you as nothing else can. (William Feather)
Don't patronize the chain bookstores. Every time I see some author scheduled to read and sign his books at a chain bookstore, I feel like telling him he's stabbing the independent bookstores in the back. (Lawrence Ferlinghetti)
Whatever our bedtime was as kids, we could stay up an extra half hour if we were reading. My parents didn't care as long as I was under the spell of a Stephen King or a Douglas Adams. Now I read in bed. I read at work. I read standing in line. It's like, 'Hello, my name is Nathan and I am a reader.' (Nathan Fillion)
I still buy actual books. The smell, having it in your hands - there's really no substitute. (Nathan Fillion)
Do not read, as children do, to amuse yourself, or like the ambitious, for the purpose of instruction. No, read in order to live. (Gustave Flaubert)
Judge the goodness of a book by the energy of the punches it has given you. (Gustave Flaubert)
I suggest that the only books that influence us are those for which we are ready, and which have gone a little further down our particular path than we have gone ourselves. (E. M. Forster)
One always tends to overpraise a long book because one has got through it. (E. M. Forster)
What is wonderful about great literature is that it transforms the man who reads it towards the condition of the man who wrote, and brings to birth in us also the creative impulse. (E. M. Forster)
The books that everybody admires are those nobody reads. (Anatole France)
Never lend a book, for no one ever returns them; the only books I have in my library are books that others have lent me. (Anatole France)
A book is judged, not by its reference to life, but by its reference to other books. (Stephen Fry)
Today a reader, tomorrow a leader. (Margaret Fuller)
I hope you read some fine books and kiss someone who thinks you're wonderful,
and don't forget to make some art... (Neil Gaiman)
What I say is, a town isn't a town without a bookstore. It may call itself a town, but unless it's got a bookstore it knows it's not fooling a soul. (Neil Gaiman)
Books are often far more than just books. (Roxane Gay)
If you're reading to find friends, you're in deep trouble. We read to find life, in all its possibilities. (Roxane Gay)
Continued growth through reading, as well as seeing and exploration, is a vital part of the greater joy of staying with it. (Robert Genn)
My early and invincible love of reading I would not exchange for all the riches of India. (Edward Gibbon)
Let us read with method, and propose to ourselves an end to which our studies may point. The use of reading is to aid us in thinking. (Edward Gibbon)
Dear me, how I love a library. (Elizabeth Gilbert)
One way an author dies a little each day is when his books go out of print. (William Goldman)
A book may be amusing with numerous errors, or it may be very dull without a single absurdity. (Oliver Goldsmith)
The first time I read an excellent work, it is to me just as if I gained a new friend; and when I read over a book I have perused before, it resembles the meeting of an old one. (Oliver Goldsmith)
I read part of it all the way through. (Samuel Goldwyn)
A book is never a masterpiece: it becomes one. Genius is the talent of a dead man. (Edmond and Jules De Goncourt)
Books, Cats, Life is Good. (Edward Gorey)
- The Birds of Great Britain...
Every sky with its varied tints and every feather of each bird were coloured by hand; and when it is considered that nearly two hundred and eighty thousand illustrations in the present work have been so treated, it will most likely cause some astonishment to those who give the subject a thought. (John Gould)
Sometimes, you read a book and it fills you with this weird evangelical zeal, and you become convinced that the shattered world will never be put back together unless and until all living humans read the book. (John Green)
...there are books...which you can't tell people about, books so special and rare and yours that advertising your affection feels like a betrayal. (John Green)
- Travels With My Aunt...
One's life is more formed, I sometimes think, by books than by human beings: it is out of books one learns about love and pain at second hand. (Henry Graham Greene)
Reading is a conversation. All books talk. But a good book listens as well. (Mark Haddon)
The greatest gift is the passion for reading. It is cheap, it consoles, it distracts, it excites, it gives you knowledge of the world and experience of a wide kind. It is a moral illumination. (Elizabeth Hardwick)
I rarely read or buy a book because of a review. (Jim Harrison)
It is not true that we have only one life to live; if we can read, we can live as many more lives and as many kinds of lives as we wish. (S. I. Hayakawa)
From your parents you learn love and laughter and how to put one foot above the other. But when books are opened you discover you have wings. (Helen Hayes)
If I have not read a book before, it is, for all intents and purposes, new to me whether it was printed yesterday or three hundred years ago. (William Hazlitt)
Wherever books are burned, sooner or later men also are burned. (Heinrich Heine)
I fell asleep reading a dull book and dreamed I kept on reading, so I awoke from sheer boredom. (Heinrich Heine)
To limit the press is to insult a nation; to prohibit the reading of certain books is to declare the inhabitants to be either fools or slaves. (Claude Adrien Helvetius)
All good books are alike in that they are truer than if they had really happened. (Ernest Hemingway)
The good parts of a book may be only something a writer is lucky enough to overhear or it may be the wreck of his whole damn life and one is as good as the other. (Ernest Hemingway)
Read as you taste fruit or savor wine, or enjoy friendship, love or life. (George Herbert)
Without words, without writing and without books there would be no history, there could be no concept of humanity. (Hermann Hesse)
The waitress comes over to me like, (gum smacking) 'What'chu readin' for?' I had never been asked that. Not 'What am I reading?' but 'What am I reading for?' Goddammit, you stumped me. Hmm, why do I read? I suppose I read for a lot of reasons, one of the main ones being so I don't end up being a... waffle waitress. (Bill Hicks)
These are not books, lumps of lifeless paper, but minds alive on the shelves. (Gilbert Highet)
The most important book on the Internet is, essentially, the Internet. (John Hodgman)
Books may well be the only true magic. (Alice Hoffman)
Reading is like permitting a man to talk a long time, and refusing you the right to answer. (Edgar Watson Howe)
The mortality of all inanimate things is terrible to me, but that of books most of all. (William Dean Howells)
In books, the proportion of exceptional to commonplace people is very high; in reality, very low. (Aldous Huxley)
The trouble with fiction is that it makes too much sense, whereas reality never makes sense. (Aldous Huxley)
Books are the money of Literature, but only the counters of Science. (Thomas H. Huxley)
The book is an unbearable totality. I write against a background of facets. (Edmond Jabes)
My reading list grows exponentially. Every time I read a book, it'll mention three other books I feel I have to read. It's like a particularly relentless series of pop-up ads. (A.J. Jacobs)
It's my experience that all good art is self-taught – whether realist or abstract. And books are the gold mine of technical information on the subject of materials and their interaction. (Joseph Jahn)
- The Summer Book...
It was a particularly good evening to begin a book. (Tove Jansson)
I cannot live without books. (Thomas Jefferson)
A man will turn over half a library to make one book. (Samuel Johnson)
A man ought to read just as inclination leads him; for what he reads as a task will do him little good. (Samuel Johnson)
In my early years I read very hard. It is a sad reflection, but a true one, that I knew almost as much at eighteen as I do now. (Samuel Johnson)
The worst thing about new books is that they keep us from reading the old ones. (Joseph Joubert)
A book must be an ice-axe to break the seas frozen inside our soul. (Franz Kafka)
A classic is a book that survives the circumstances that made it possible yet alone keeps those circumstances alive. (Alfred Kazin)
A book is a gift you can open again and again. (Garrison Keillor)
-Powell's Books, interview...
A cookbook must have recipes, but it shouldn't be a blueprint. The book is there for inspiration and as a foundation, the fundamentals on which to build. (Thomas Keller)
- b.ca.1380 d.1471...
I have sought everywhere for peace, but I have found it not save in a little nook and in a little book. (Thomas a Kempis)
One of my favorite things to do is read. Just put a good cup of coffee in my hand, dump me off at Barnes & Noble, and I'm the happiest guy in the world. (Daniel J. Keys)
Books are a uniquely portable magic. (Stephen King)
Except a living man, there is nothing more wonderful than a book. (Charles Kingsley)
I attempted briefly to consecrate myself in the public library, believing every crack in my soul could be chinked with a book. (Barbara Kingsolver)
Books, like lives, are always unfinished even when they end, for to write is to struggle with contingency, to impose a certain false order upon the endless, and endlessly frustrating, nature of thought. (Mark Kingwell)
Sometimes I miss out the morning's painting session and instead study my Japanese books in the open. (Gustav Klimt)
Each reader needs to bring his or her own mind and heart to the text. (Dean Koontz)
Where do I find the time for not reading so many books? (Karl Kraus)
Why do you want to read others' books when there is the book of yourself? (Jiddu Krishnamurti)
I love to lose myself in other men's minds. When I am not walking, I am reading; I cannot sit and think. Books think for me. (Charles Lamb)
Borrowers of books - those mutilators of collections, spoilers of the symmetry of shelves, and creators of odd volumes. (Charles Lamb)
E-books are great for instant gratification - you see a review somewhere of a book that interests you, and you can start reading it five minutes later. (Anne Lamott)
What is reading but silent conversation? (Walter Savage Landor)
He who praises a good book becomingly, is next in merit to the author. (Walter Savage Landor)
Get stewed. Books are a load of crap. (Philip Larkin)
If it weren't for the law, I would steal books; if it weren't for my purse, I would buy them. (Harold Joseph Laski)
The classics are only primitive literature. They belong in the same class as primitive machinery and primitive music and primitive medicine. (Stephen Leacock)
Having your book turned into a movie is like seeing your oxen turned into bouillon cubes. (John LeCarre)
By and large books are mankind's best invention. (Ursula K. LeGuin)
The unread story is not a story; it is little black marks on wood pulp. The reader, reading it, makes it live: a live thing, a story. (Ursula K. LeGuin)
The books we love, love us back. In gratitude, we should promise not to cheat on them - not to pretend we're better than they are; not to use them as target practice... We are reading for our lives, not performing like seals for some fresh fish. (John Leonard, critic)
No book is really worth reading at the age of ten which is not equally – and often far more – worth reading at the age of fifty and beyond. (C. S. Lewis)
Buying books was a way anyone could acquire a work of art for very little. (Sol LeWitt)
A book is a mirror: if an ape looks into it an apostle is hardly likely to look out. (Georg Christoph Lichtenberg)
To read means to borrow; to create out of one's readings is paying off one's debts. (Georg Christoph Lichtenberg)
I look upon book reviews as an infantile disease which new-born books are subject to. (Georg Christoph Lichtenberg)
Books serve to show a man that those original thoughts of his aren't very new after all. (Abraham Lincoln)
Reading furnishes the mind only with material for knowledge; it is thinking that makes what we read ours. (John Locke)
The love of learning, the sequestered nooks, / And all the sweet serenity of books. (Henry Wadsworth Longfellow)
Books are the bees which carry the quickening pollen from one to another mind. (James Russell Lowell)
What a sense of security in an old book which time has criticized for us. (James Russell Lowell)
We may sit in our library and yet be in all quarters of the earth. (John Lubbock)
We profit little by books we do not enjoy. (John Lubbock)
The multitude of books is a great evil. There is no limit to this fever for writing. (Martin Luther)
I would rather be poor in a cottage full of books than a king without the desire to read. (Thomas B. Macaulay)
What is more important in a library than anything else - than everything else - is the fact that it exists. (Archibald MacLeish)
Only two classes of books are of universal appeal. The very best and the very worst. (Ford Maddox)
If the novel is dead, I'm a necrophiliac. (Tiffany Madison)
Every one of my books has killed me a little more. (Norman Mailer)
An art book is a museum without walls. (Andre Malraux)
- Life of Pi...
My greatest wish - other than salvation - was to have a book. A long book with a never-ending story. One I could read again and again, with new eyes and a fresh understanding each time. (Yann Martel)
I must say that I find television very educational. The minute somebody turns it on, I go to the library and read a book. (Groucho Marx)
Outside of a dog, a book is man's best friend. Inside of a dog, it's too dark to read. (Groucho Marx)
There are seventy million books in American libraries, but the one you want is always out. (Thomas L. Masson)
The chief knowledge that a man gets from reading books is the knowledge that very few of them are worth reading. (H. L. Mencken)
Creative thinkers read to feed their minds new information and ideas. As Gore Vidal put it, 'The brain that doesn't feed itself eats itself.' (Michael Michalko)
If your book doesn't keep you up nights when you are writing it, it won't keep anyone up nights reading it. (James A. Michener)
Public libraries have been a mainstay of my life. They represent an individual's right to acquire knowledge; they are the sinews that bind civilized societies the world over. (James A. Michener)
A good book is the precious lifeblood of a master spirit, embalmed and treasured up on purpose to life beyond life. (John Milton)
Show me the books he loves and I shall know the man far better than through mortal friends. (S. Weir Mitchell)
No entertainment is so cheap as reading, nor any pleasure so lasting. (Mary Wortley Montagu)
I am myself the subject of my book; it is not reasonable to expect you to waste your leisure on a matter so frivolous and empty. (Michel de Montaigne)
I've never known any trouble that an hour's reading didn't assuage. (Baron de Montesquieu)
- Anne of Windy Poplars...
I hate to lend a book I love... it never seems quite the same when it comes back to me. (Lucy Maud Montgomery)
Read every day something no one else is reading. Think something no one else is thinking. It is bad for the mind to be always a part of unanimity. (Christopher Morley)
The real purpose of books is to trap the mind into doing its own thinking. (Christopher Morley)
If there is a book that you want to read, but it hasn't been written yet, the you must be the one to write it. (Toni Morrison)
After all, it's the librarian's sworn purpose to bring books together with their one true reader. (Kate Morton)
I have a low opinion of books: they are piles of stones set up to show coming travelers where other minds have been, or at best signal smokes to call attention... (John Muir)
The books that help you most are those which make you think the most. The hardest way of learning is that of easy reading; but a great book that comes from a great thinker is a ship of thought, deep freighted with truth and beauty. (Pablo Neruda)
Am I allowed to ask my book / whether it's true I wrote it? (Pablo Neruda)
A great value of antiquity lies in the fact that its writings are the only ones that modern men still read with exactness. (Friedrich Nietzsche)
Books are standing counselors and preachers, always at hand, and always disinterested; having this advantage over oral instructors, that they are ready to repeat their lesson as often as we please. (Louis Nizer)
Books are standing counselors and preachers, always at hand, and always disinterested; having this advantage over oral instructors, that they are ready to repeat their lesson as often as we please. (Louis Nizer)
Books are a time machine. (Jonathan Nolan)
Just the knowledge that a good book is awaiting one at the end of a long day makes that day happier. (Kathleen Norris)
The novel is an art form and when you use it for anything other than art, you pervert it. (Flannery O'Connor)
Always read stuff that will make you look good if you die in the middle of it. (P. J. O'Rourke)
Prolonged, indiscriminate reviewing of books is a quite exceptionally thankless, irritating and exhausting job. It not only involves praising trash but constantly inventing reactions toward books about which one has no spontaneous feeling whatever. (George Orwell)
Why do I do this every Sunday? Even the book reviews seem to be the same as last week's. Different books same reviews. (John James Osborne)
It is easier to buy books than to read them, and easier to read them than to absorb them. (Sir William Osler)
This is not a novel to be tossed aside lightly. It should be thrown with great force. (Dorothy Parker)
The books that help you the most are those which make you think the most. (Theodore Parker)
A book, like a person, has its fortunes with one; is lucky or unlucky in the precise moment of its falling in our way, and often by some happy accident counts with us for something more than its independent value. (Walter Pater)
- Rooftop Soliloquy...
Alexander the Great slept with The Iliad beneath his pillow. During the waning moon, I cradle Homer's Odyssey as if it were the sweet body of a woman. (Roman Payne)
Literature is the most agreeable way of ignoring life. (Fernando Pessoa)
Wear the old coat and buy the new book. (Austin Phelps)
Books are certainly old fashioned, but only people with a very limited perception are silly enough to condemn ideas because of their age. It is, of course, equally silly to condemn the new fangled simply because it is strange... (Prince Philip)
I tend to pull nuggets out of many books - rather than having a handful of books that serve as guiding lights. (Daniel H. Pink)
The bookful blockhead, ignorantly read / With loads of learned lumber in his head. (Alexander Pope)
Man reading should be man intensely alive. The book should be a ball of light in one's hand. (Ezra Pound)
This is no book. Whoever touches this touches a man. (Ezra Pound)
Books do furnish a room. (Anthony Powell)
- The Valley of Bones...
Books are unconvertible assets, to be passed on only to those who possess them already. (Anthony Powell)
A book, tight shut, is but a block of paper. (Chinese proverb)
Never judge a book by its cover. (English proverb)
No book is so bad, but some good might be got out of it. (Latin proverb)
Under our present enormous accumulation of books, I do affirm that a most miserable distraction of choice must be very generally incident to the times; that the symptoms of it are in fact very prevalent, and that one of the chief symptoms is an enormous 'gluttonism' for books. (Thomas de Quincey)
Many good sayings are to be found in holy books, but merely reading them will not make one religious. (Ramakrishna)
The book you don't read won't help. (Jim Rohn)
Don't just read the easy stuff. You may be entertained by it, but you will never grow from it. (Jim Rohn)
Miss a meal if you have to, but don't miss a book. (Jim Rohn)
A library should be like a pair of open arms. (Roger Rosenblatt)
Everybody else is working to change, persuade, tempt and control them. The best readers come to fiction to be free of all that noise. (Philip Roth)
I hate books. They only teach us to talk about things we know nothing about. (Henri Rousseau)
I hate books, they only teach us to talk about things we know nothing about. (Jean-Jacques Rousseau)
You can lead a fool to a book, but you can't make them think. (J. K. Rowling)
A book is a version of the world. If you do not like it, ignore it; or offer your own version in return. (Salman Rushdie)
It is very, very easy not to be offended by a book. You just have to shut it. (Salman Rushdie)
If a book is worth reading, it is worth buying. (John Ruskin)
All books are divisible into two classes, the books of the hour, and the books of all time. (John Ruskin)
There are two reasons for reading a book; one, that you enjoy it, the other that you can boast about it. (Bertrand Russell)
- b.1934 d.1996...
All of the books in the world contain no more information than is broadcast as video in a single large American city in a single year. Not all bits have equal value. (Carl Sagan)
I'm quite illiterate, but I read a lot. (J. D. Salinger)
What really knocks me out is a book that, when you're all done reading it, you wish the author that wrote it was a terrific friend of yours and you could call him up on the phone whenever you felt like it. (J. D. Salinger)
A library is thought in cold storage. (Herbert Samuel)
A good book appeals to what is best in us. (Scott Russell Sanders)
There are books in which the footnotes, or the comments scrawled by some reader's hand in the margin, are more interesting than the text. The world is one of those books. (George Santayana)
Librarians lend people books from the library. The best librarians are children's book librarians. (Richard Scarry)
I'm not interested in creating a book that is read once and then placed on the shelf and forgotten. I am very happy when people have worn out my books, or that they're held together by Scotch tape. (Richard Scarry)
Publication is to thinking as childbirth is to the first kiss. (Friedrich Von Schlegel)
Reading is a discount ticket to everywhere. (Mary Schmich)
- Okay for Now...
I'm a librarian. I always know what I'm talking about. (Gary D. Schmidt)
Many books serve merely to show how many ways there are of being wrong, and how far astray you yourself would go if you followed their guidance. You should read only when your own thoughts dry up... (Arthur Schopenhauer)
Buying books would be a good thing if one could also buy the time to read them in: but as a rule the purchase of books is mistaken for the appropriation of their contents. (Arthur Schopenhauer)
-Oasis Magazine, June 2008...
When I taught, a lot of my students weren't big readers, so they would write something and I realized that they thought it belonged in a book. Like, they didn't know what the inside of a book looked like, you know what I mean? (David Sedaris)
The big advantage of a book is it's very easy to rewind. Close it and you're right back at the beginning. (Jerry Seinfeld)
A book is really like a lover. It arranges itself in your life in a way that is beautiful. (Maurice Sendak)
Ebooks: I hate them. It's like making believe there's another kind of sex. There isn't another kind of sex. There isn't another kind of book! A book is a book is a book. (Maurice Sendak)
Be awesome! Be a book nut! (Dr. Seuss)
Libraries store the energy that fuels the imagination. They open up windows to the world and inspire us to explore and achieve, and contribute to improving our quality of life. Libraries change lives for the better. (Sidney Sheldon)
The world may be divided into people that read, people that write, people that think, and fox-hunters. (William Shenstone)
- interview with Tim Clark, 2004...
I think my books are better than my exhibitions. If people don't like my books then I don't mind. I guess you like them enough to write an essay about them so that makes me pretty happy. (David Shrigley)
If there is a book you want to read but isn't written yet, write it. (Shel Silverstein)
People say that life is the thing, but I prefer reading. (Logan Pearsall Smith)
Employ your time in improving yourself by other men's writings, so that you shall gain easily what others have labored hard for. (Socrates)
Literature transmits incontrovertible condensed experience... from generation to generation. In this way literature becomes the living memory of a nation. (Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn)
Due attention to the inside of books, and due contempt for the outside, is the proper relation between a man of sense and his books. (Philip Dormer Stanhope)
When we are collecting books, we are collecting happiness. (Vincent Starret)
Reading is to the mind what exercise is to the body. (Richard Steele)
I guess there are never enough books. (John Steinbeck)
A novel is a mirror which passes over a highway. Sometimes it reflects to your eyes the blue of the skies, at others the churned-up mud of the road. (Stendhal)
The house was quiet and the world was calm. / The reader became the book; and summer night / Was like the conscious being of the book. / The house was quiet and the world was calm. (Wallace Stevens)
Books are good enough in their own way, but they are a mighty bloodless substitute for life. (Robert Louis Stevenson)
There are no faster or firmer friendships than those formed between people who love the same books. (Irving Stone)
A great book should leave you with many experiences, and slightly exhausted at the end. You live several lives while reading it. (William Styron)
Most books, like their authors, are born to die; of only a few books can it be said that death has no dominion over them; they live, and their influence lives forever. (William Styron)
Books, like proverbs, receive their chief value from the stamp and esteem of ages through which they passed. (Sir William Temple)
Who ever converses among old books will be hard to please among the new. (Sir William Temple)
To read well, that is, to read true books in a true spirit, is a noble exercise, and one that will task the reader more than any other exercise which the customs of the day esteem. It requires a training such as the athletes underwent... (Henry David Thoreau)
Read the best books first, or you may not have a chance to read them at all. (Henry David Thoreau)
- What is Art?, 1896...
In spite the mountains of books written about art, no precise definition of art has been constructed. And the reason for this is that the conception of art has been based on the conception of beauty. (Leo Tolstoy)
If you read a lot of books, you're considered well-read. But if you watch a lot of TV, you're not considered well-viewed. (Lily Tomlin)
What we read and why we do so defines us in a profound way. You are what you read, I suppose. Browsing through someone's library is like peeking into their DNA. (Guillermo del Toro)
Read an hour every day in your chosen field. This works out to about one book per week, 50 books per year, and will guarantee your success. (Brian Tracy)
Education... has produced a vast population able to read but unable to distinguish what is worth reading. (George Macaulay Trevelyan)
Of all the needs a book has, the chief need is that it be readable. (Anthony Trollope)
Upon books the collective education of the race depends; they are the sole instruments of registering, perpetuating and transmitting thought. (Harry S. Truman)
A good book is the best of friends, the same today and forever. (Martin Farquhar Tupper)
There's nothing more radical, nothing more revolutionary, nothing more subversive against injustice and oppression than the Bible. (Desmond Tutu)
The man who does not read good books, has no advantage over the man who can't read them. (Mark Twain)
A classic is something that everybody wants to have read and nobody wants to read. (Mark Twain)
My books are water; those of the great geniuses are wine - everybody drinks water. (Mark Twain)
The moment when the finished book or, better yet, a tightly packed carton of finished books arrives on my doorstep is the moment of truth, of culmination; its bliss lasts as much as five minutes, until the first typographical error or production flaw is noticed. (John Updike)
Books have the same enemies as people: fire, humidity, animals, weather, and their own content. (Paul Valery)
The superior excellence imputed to the book, which imitates the products of antique and obsolete processes, is conceived to be chiefly a superior utility in the aesthetic respect; but it is not unusual to find a well-bred book-lover insisting that the clumsier product is also more serviceable as a vehicle of printed speech. (Thorstein Veblen)
What is in question is a kind of book reviewing which seems to be more and more popular: the loose putting down of opinions as though they were facts, and the treating of facts as though they were opinions. (Gore Vidal)
Happy will be those who give ear to the words of the dead: - The reading of good works and the observing of their precepts. (Leonardo da Vinci)
Things severed shall be united and shall acquire of themselves such virtue that they shall restore to men their lost memory: - That is the papyrus sheets, which are formed out of several strips and preserve the memory of the thoughts and deeds of men. (Leonardo da Vinci)
The instruction we find in books is like fire. We fetch it from our neighbours, kindle it at home, communicate it to others, and it becomes the property of all. (Voltaire)
I pored over art books and absorbed the placidness of Monet's garden, the sparkling color of the Impressionists, the strength and solidity of Michelangelo's figures showing the titanic power of humans at one with God, Jan Vermeer's serene Dutch women bathed in gorgeous honey-colored light... My conviction grew that art was stronger than death. (Susan Vreeland)
I have always had more books on art than room to display them all. (Milos Vujasinovic)
Paintings are book histories and sermons, which can be read without the trouble of turning the pages. (Van Waldron)
It had been startling and disappointing to me to find out that story books had been written by people, that books were not natural wonders, coming of themselves like grass. (Eudora Welty)
I wanted to read immediately. The only fear was that of books coming to an end. (Eudora Welty)
A library is a good place to go when you feel unhappy, for there, in a book, you may find encouragement and comfort. (E. B. White)
Can there be enough books to answer all your questions? (Jack White)
The dirtiest book of all is the expurgated book. (Walt Whitman)
The best of a book is not the thought which it contains, but the thought which it suggests; just as the charm of music dwells not in the tones but in the echoes of our hearts. (John Greenleaf Whittier)
Books no longer have the power they once did. Those who kept silent yesterday will remain silent tomorrow. (Elie Wiesel)
It is what you read when you don't have to that determines what you will be when you can't help it. (Oscar Wilde)
If one cannot enjoy reading a book over and over again, there is no use in reading it at all. (Oscar Wilde)
People respect nonfiction but they read novels. (Edward O. Wilson)
Dreams, books, are each a world; and books, we know, / Are a substantial world, both pure and good. (William Wordsworth)
Old books that have ceased to be of service should no more be abandoned than should old friends who have ceased to give pleasure. (Peregrine Worsthorne)
I surrendered to a world of my imagination, re-enacting all those wonderful tales my father would read aloud to me. I became a very active reader, especially history and Shakespeare. (Andrew Wyeth)
My Alma mater was books, a good library... I could spend the rest of my life reading, just satisfying my curiosity. (Malcolm X)
Books are but waste paper unless we spend in action the wisdom we get from thought - asleep. When we are weary of the living, we may repair to the dead, who have nothing of peevishness, pride, or design in their conversation. (William Butler Yeats)
-once described his initial concept of publishing this way...
Approach writers you admire, acquire book rights to their shorter and offbeat works and turn them into books. (Noel Young)
The wise man reads both books and life itself. (Lin Yutang)
So many books, so little time. (Frank Zappa)
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