I still remember the day my father took me to the Cemetery of Forgotten Books for the first time.

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.

Youth is a time when we find the books we give up but do not get over.

Literature is analysis after the event.

Children deprived of words become school dropouts; dropouts deprived of hope behave delinquently. Amateur censors blame delinquency on reading immoral books and magazines, when in fact, the inability to read anything is the basic trouble.

A literary movement consists of five or six people who live in the same town and hate each other cordially.

When I have a little money, I buy books; and if I have any left, I buy food and clothes.

There is but one way left to save a classic: to give up revering him and use him for our own salvation.

Books fall from Garry Wills like leaves from a maple tree in a sort of permanent October.

The liveliness of literature lies in its exceptionality, in being the individual, idiosyncratic vision of one human being, in which, to our delight and great surprise, we may find our own vision reflected.

When you read the psychedelic literature, there is a distinction between the so called natural psychedelics and synthetic psychedelics that are artificially produced.

The proper study of mankind is books.

Whoever has the luck to be born a character can laugh even at death. Because a character will never die! A man will die, a writer, the instrument of creation: but what he has created will never die!

I think my books come out very visual, which is an obvious consequence.

You can travel the world and never leave your chair when you read a book.

Books are my friends, my companions. They make me laugh and cry and find meaning in life.

Looking for alaska first friend, first girl, last words.

Books are the treasured wealth of the world and the fit inheritance of generations and nations.

Books let us into their souls and lay open to us the secrets of our own.

There is no reason why the same man should like the same books at eighteen and at forty eight- Ezra Pound

Do not, under any circumstances, belittle a work of fiction by trying to turn it into a carbon copy of real life; what we search for in fiction is not so much reality but the epiphany of truth.

The books that help you the most are those which make you think the most.

Most of my books have been written in the form of fantasy.

Books the best antidote against the marsh gas of boredom and vacuity

The library is inhabited by spirits that come out of the pages at night.

The atmosphere of orthodoxy is always damaging to prose, and above all it is completely ruinous to the novel, the most anarchical of all forms of literature.

All good books have one thing in common they are truer than if they had really happened.

I think it is good that books still exist, but they do make me sleepy.

An hour spent reading is one stolen from paradise.

Many good sayings are to be found in holy books, but merely reading them will not make one religious.

Master books, but do not let them master you. Read to live, not live to read.

All that mankind has done, thought or been: it is lying as in magic preservation in the pages of books.

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.

The pure work implies the disappearance of the poet as speaker, who hands over to the words.

I hate books; they only teach us to talk about things we know nothing about.

A good book is the precious lifeblood of a master spirit, embalmed and treasured up on purpose to life beyond life.

Learning why one great book is just like every other great book is the key to understanding literature

Books are good enough in their own way, but they are a mighty bloodless substitute for living.

Books worth reading once are worth reading twice; and what is most important of all, the masterpieces of literature are worth reading a thousand times.

A half read book is a half finished love affair.

A book must be the axe for the frozen sea within us.

English literature is a kind of training in social ethics. English trains you to handle a body of information in a way that is conducive to action.

Literature is where I go to explore the highest and lowest places in human society and in the human spirit, where I hope to find not absolute truth but the truth of the tale, of the imagination and of the heart.

Reading gives us someplace to go when we have to stay where we are.

Literature always anticipates life. It does not copy it, but moulds it to its purpose. The nineteenth century, as we know it, is largely an invention of Balzac.

Honesty is the first chapter of the book wisdom.

Literature adds to reality, it does not simply describe it. It enriches the necessary competencies that daily life requires and provides; and in this respect, it irrigates the deserts that our lives have already become.

Literature does not exist in a vacuum. Writers as such have a definite social function exactly proportional to their ability as writers. This is their main use.

So many books, so little time.

But a girl of seventeen is not always thinking of books, especially in the Oxford summer term.

A good metaphor is something even the police should keep an eye on.

It is time to browse through the precious books that have meant the most to you that you may rediscover illuminating phrases and sentences to light your pathway to the future...

Despite the enormous quantity of books, how few people read! And if one reads profitably, one would realize how much stupid stuff the vulgar herd is content to swallow every day.

Study nature, not books.

In the dime stores and bus stations, people talk of situations, read books, repeat quotations, draw conclusions on the wall.

Finally, from so little sleeping and so much reading, his brain dried up and he went completely out of his mind.

People do not deserve to have good writings; they are so pleased with the bad.

But there is in everything a reasonable division of labour. I have written the book, and nothing on earth would induce me to read it.

Her reputation for reading a great deal hung about her like the cloudy envelope of a goddess in an epic.

What is not in the open street is false, derived, that is to say, literature.

A house without books is like a room without windows.

It is a good thing for an uneducated man to read books of quotations.

You can never get a cup of tea large enough or a book long enough to suit me.

She is too fond of books, and it has turned her brain.

Books are humanity in print.

Winter is here...'

I am not a literary man. I am a man of science, and I am interested in that branch of Anthropology which deals with the history of human speech.

I used to get a haircut every Saturday so I would never miss any of the comic books. I had practically no hair when I was a kid!

Literature could be said to be a sort of disciplined technique for arousing certain emotions.

It takes a certain ingenuous faith but I have it to believe that people who read and reflect more likely than not come to judge things with liberality and truth.

The flesh is sad, alas, and I have read all the books.

In her minds eye she sat there, in the domesticated golden sunlight on the velvet sofa, lapped around by carpets and books and mahogany, solitary and content, as if, in fact, cloistered.

There are perhaps no days of our childhood we lived so fully as those we believe we left without having lived them, those we spent with a favorite book.

Let love in, let love win. from Sawyer, Torey Hope: The Later Years by A.D. Ellis

One learns little more about a man from his feats of literary memory than from the feats of his alimentary canal.

Don Quixote could never manage without his patient servant Sancho Panza.

If you only read the books that everyone else is reading you can only think what everyone else is thinking.

It is not the first duty of the novelist to provide blueprints for insurrection, or uplifting tales of successful resistance for the benefit of the opposition. The naming of what is there is what is important.

The naturalistic literature of this country has reached such a state that no family of characters is considered true to life which does not include at least two hypochondriacs, one sadist, and one old man who spills food down the front of his vest.

Just the knowledge that a good book is awaiting one at the end of a long day makes that day happier.

Literature exists at the same time in the modes of error and truth; it both betrays and obeys its own mode of being.

How has the human spirit ever survived the terrific literature with which it has had to contend?

Nothing could be more inappropriate to American literature than its English source since the Americans are not British in sensibility.

The experience of the race shows that we get our most important education not through books but through our work. We are developed by our daily task, or else demoralized by it, as by nothing else.

The self styled intellectual who is impotent with pen and ink hungers to write history with sword and blood.

I just knew there were stories I wanted to tell.

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.

A book is more than the sum of its materials. It is an artifact of the human mind and hand.

When you are writing, of course, you have to do all that writing and correcting for yourself. When I was a librarian it was expected that I would know about a wide range of books.

Books themselves need no defense. Their spokesmen come and go, their readers live and die, they remain constant.

I started to write in 2001. I wrote the books for the fun of it. It was an old idea I had had since the nineties.

Comic books were just the means for me to tell the story.

The cultivation of literary pursuits forms the basis of all sciences, and in their perfection consist the reputation and prosperity of kingdoms.

There are three schoolmasters for everybody that will employ them the senses, intelligent companions, and books.

We cannot learn men from books.

Books are true levelers. They give to all, who will faithfully use them, the society, the spiritual presence, of the best and greatest of our race.

My only objection to the custom of giving books as Christmas presents is perhaps the selfish one that it encourages and keeps in the game a number of writers who would be far better employed if they abandoned the pen and took to work.

Literature is the human activity that make the fullest and most precise account of variousness, possibility, complexity, and difficulty.

When I was growing up, I always read horror books, while my sister read romance novels.

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.

As repressed sadists are supposed to become policemen or butchers so those with an irrational fear of life become publishers.

To paint comic books as childish and illiterate is lazy. A lot of comic books are very literate unlike most films.

There is a great discovery still to be made in literature, that of paying literary men by the quantity they do not write.

I obtained a job at the Library of Congress. I loved books, so I felt at home. I was going to end up, I thought, majoring in English and teach at the college level.

There are worse crimes than burning books. One of them is not reading them.

What we become depends on what we read after all of the professors have finished with us. The greatest university of all is a collection of books.

I do give books as gifts sometimes, when people would rather have one than a new Ferrari.

I hate books, for they only teach people to talk about what they do not understand.

Have you ever heard the expression: Walk a mile in my shoes, and then judge me? And write your own books.

Literature is the expression of a feeling of deprivation, a recourse against a sense of something missing. But the contrary is also true: language is what makes us human. It is a recourse against the meaningless noise and silence of nature and history.

Never trust a man who reads only one book.

I think Walking Dead is one of the friendliest new reader type books in that every time a new trade is shipped out, a new issue is shipped out at the same time.

My hardcover sales are 17% down in books but up 400% in electronics.

Literature is the immortality of speech.

Books and opinions, no matter from whom they came, if they are in opposition to human rights, are nothing but dead letters.

There can be no literary equivalent to truth.

I was with book, as a woman is with child.

What refuge is there for the victim who is oppressed with the feeling that there are a thousand new books he ought to read, while life is only long enough for him to attempt to read a hundred?

Now, I had been drawing all this time especially in France of course so, when I came back, my father gave me the chance to do a cover for one of the books he published.

I think Americans like the practical; they like the human. And I like both those things myself, and I try and put them into my books.

When I was starting out, I did not do short fiction well, because I kept wanting to write books.

I have given up reading books; I find it takes my mind off myself.

A losing trade, I assure you, sir: literature is a drug.

Literature is without proofs. By which it must be understood that it cannot prove, not only what it says, but even that it is worth the trouble of saying it.

The praise of ancient authors proceeds not from the reverence of the dead, but from the competition and mutual envy of the living.

The fact is, the public make use of the classics of a country as a means of checking the progress of Art. They degrade the classics into authorities. They use them as bludgeons for preventing the free expression of Beauty in new forms.

To see this place would truly be worth a trip to India in itself, and from the spirit of the religion that lived here one can learn more in an hour of viewing than from all the books ever written.

I never thought I would just be doing Arkady books.

It is clear that the books owned the shop rather than the other way about. Everywhere they had run wild and taken possession of their habitat, breeding and multiplying, and clearly lacking any strong hand to keep them down.

Child! Do not throw this book about;Refrain from the unholy pleasureOf cutting all the pictures out!Preserve it as your chiefest treasure.

We are made whole By books, as by great spaces and the stars

There are two motives for reading a book; one, that you enjoy it; the other, that you can boast about it.

Professors of literature collect books the way a ship collects barnacles, without seeming effort.

Without story books is like a person with no soul.

Where they have burned books, they will end in burning human beings.

If sex is such a natural phenomenon, how come there are so many books on how to do it?

I know at my church a lot of the times we sung from hymn books and as we got older we started to change with time. I can honestly say that I was never influenced to write for the church.

Miffy has changed quite a lot since the early books, although I never realised it at the time.

It is those books which a man possesses but does not read which constitute the most suspicious evidence against him.

Feeling his mouth on mine Is my kind of Heaven, AND I don't want to stop Kissing Him

The great standard of literature as to purity and exactness of style is the Bible.

The attempt to devote oneself to literature alone is a most deceptive thing, and often, paradoxically, it is literature that suffers for it.

To limit the press is to insult a nation; to prohibit reading of certain books is to declare the inhabitants to be either fools or slaves.

A literary academic can no more pass a bookstore than an alcoholic can pass a bar.

Perversity is the muse of modern literature.

I never buy magazines, I never even buy books.

You come to work because the office is a resource: The office is a place where you can meet with other people, and the office has libraries of books and information on CD ROM that might help you with your work.

With a pen in my hand I have successfully stormed bulwarks from which others armed with sword and excommunication have been repulsed.

A book is never a masterpiece: it becomes one. Genius is the talent of a dead man.

I love meeting fans. The people who are fans of my books are really smart and dedicated, because some independent comics are hard to get. I will drive all the way to Pittsburgh or Detroit to put it in their hands.

Anybody can write a three volume novel. It merely requires a complete ignorance of both life and literature.

I will try to write books until I drop dead.

Books can now be on the stands within days from delivery of a formatted manuscript, and often are.

Literature must become party literature. Down with unpartisan litterateurs! Down with the superman of literature! Literature must become a part of the general cause of the proletariat.

Books are the legacies that a great genius leaves to mankind, which are delivered down from generation to generation as presents to the posterity of those who are yet unborn.

The writer in western civilization has become not a voice of his tribe, but of his individuality. This is a very narrow minded situation.

Literature flourishes best when it is half trade and half an art.

I knew I would read all kinds of books and try to get at what it is that makes good writers good. But I made no promises that I would write books a lot of people would like to read.

I spend a lot of time preparing. I think a lot about what I want to do. I have prep books, little notebooks in which I write everything down before a sitting. Otherwise I would forget my ideas.

It is with books as with men: a very small number play a great part.

The book borrower...proves himself to be an inveterate collector of books not so much by the fervor with which he guards his borrowed treasures...as by his failure to read these books.

For several days after my first book was published I carried it about in my pocket, and took surreptitious peeps at it to make sure the ink had not faded.

One of the great things about books is sometimes there are some fantastic pictures.

Nine tenths of tactics are certain, and taught in books: but the irrational tenth is like the kingfisher flashing across the pool, and that is the test of generals.

Some books should be tasted, some devoured, but only a few should be chewed and digested thoroughly.

When I discovered libraries, it was like having Christmas every day.

Though my books are written from a historical perspective, I have goon so far back that I am in the realm of prehistorical speculation rather than simple historical fact to weave my stories around.

The one thing I regret is that I will never have time to read all the books I want to read.

In other words, the people who populate my books are more than caricatures.

That is a good book which opened with expectation and closed with profit.

A publisher is a specialized form of bank or building society, catering for customers who cannot cope with life and are therefore forced to write about it.

Unless their use by readers bring them to life, books are indeed dead things.

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

Given Pounds and five years, and an ordinary man can in the ordinary course, without any undue haste or putting any pressure upon his taste, surround himself with books, all in his own language, and thence forward have at least one place in the world.

I wish I had had my books when I was a kid, I do.

I am really impressed by lawyers who write books and tell us that they never lost a case. Most lawyers who have never lost a case have not had enough hard cases. But there are very difficult cases out there.

Books are the plane, and the train, and the road. They are the destination, and the journey. They are home.

She read books quickly and compulsively, paperback after paperback, as if she might drift away without the anchor of the printed page.

…only then did I wake out of the book.

Books are good enough in their own way, but they are a poor substitute for life.

In literature the ambition of the novice is to acquire the literary language: the struggle of the adept is to get rid of it.

For whatever is truly wondrous and fearful in man, never yet was put into words or books.

Any book which is at all important should be reread immediately.

I love books. I read voraciously, and I happened to have been fortunate to have been in the right place at the right time.

The reading of all good books is like a conversation with the finest minds of past centuries.

The oldest books are only just out to those who have not read them.

My last comment was, though, that Congress has cooked the books.

Literature is the one place in any society where, within the secrecy of our own heads, we can hear voices talking about everything in every possible way.

Comic books and The Chronicles of Narnia. My mother used to read those to me and my twin brother growing up.

To add a library to a house is to give that house a soul.

So, in effect, my first sale was actually two books.

Literature transforms and intensifies ordinary language, deviates systematically from everyday speech. If you approach me at a bus stop and murmur Thou still unravished bride of quietness, then I am instantly aware that I am in the presence of the literary.

Biography is the most universally pleasant and profitable of all reading.

Finding people who get enormous pleasure from reading books is a more and more unusual experience, and so writers just so much want to be heard.

Literature... is condemned (or privileged) to be forever the most rigorous and, consequently, the most reliable of terms in which man names and transforms himself.

The worth of a book is to be measured by what you can carry away from it a

Some books are to be tasted, others to be swallowed, and some few to be chewed and digested.

No one is fit to judge a book until he has rounded Cape Horn in a sailing vessel, until he has bumped into two or three icebergs, until he has been lost in the sands of the desert, until he has spent a few years in the House of the Dead.

Do not consider it proof just because it is written in books, for a liar who will deceive with his tongue will not hesitate to do the same with his pen.

If you don’t like to read, you haven’t found the right book.

Fairy tales are more than true: not because they tell us that dragons exist, but because they tell us that dragons can be beaten.

Only two classes of books are of universal appeal. The very best and the very worst.

Then I found books that were written much later, as late as 15 years ago. It was very superficial material, but enough to tell me that the genesis of this story was worth exploring.

The multitude of books is making us ignorant.

Speak of the moderns without contempt, and of the ancients without idolatry.

When I was writing my first two books I was also freelancing and teaching and doing other odd jobs.

Readers are paramount. I live to write books for them.

O livro que espalma a flor nas suas págimas transforma a em borboleta.

Prose books are the show dogs I breed and sell to support my cat.

Henry James seems most entirely in his element, doing that is to say what everything favors his doing, when it is a question of recollection. The mellow light which swims over the past, the beauty which suffuses even the commonest little figures of that

There is an incompatibility between literary creation and political activity.

All books are divisible into two classes, the books of the hour, and the books of all time.

Take no heed of her.... She reads a lot of books.

Literature is the orchestration of platitudes.

If another Messiah was born he could hardly do so much good as the printing press.

It is with the reading of books the same as with looking at pictures; one must, without doubt, without hesitations, with assurance, admire what is beautiful.

With a few flowers in my garden, half a dozen pictures and some books, I live without envy.

Most people and particularly people whose lives have nothing to do with books at all are intrigued by the idea that somebody wants to listen to them and get it right.

What a word is truth. Slippery, tricky, unreliable. I tried in these books to tell the truth.

All that I know about my life, it seems, I have learned in books.

All literature is political.

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.

When I am dead, I hope it may be said: His sins were scarlet, but his books were read.

We went to the British Museum, and I was looking up my family in the books pages and pages on it.

I actually really suck at naming books, so lots of years ago, readers were sending in their ideas for titles, and what we realized is that they were smarter than us. So we thought, Hey, go for it. So now we have a contest every year.

We have talked long enough in this country about equal rights. It is time now to write the next chapter and to write it in the books of law.

For books continue each other, in spite of our habit of judging them separately.

Ulysses could have done with a good editor. You know people are always putting Ulysses in the top 10 books ever written but I doubt that any of those people were really moved by it.

I just write the books that I think I would want to read.

This is no book. Whoever touches this touches a man.

The true university of these days is a collection of books.

The Twist was a guided missile launched from the ghetto into the heart of suburbia. The Twist succeeded, as politics, religion and law could never do, in writing in the heart and soul what the Supreme Court could only write on the books.

The struggle of literature is in fact a struggle to escape from the confines of language; it stretches out from the utmost limits of what can be said; what stirs literature is the call and attraction of what is not in the dictionary.

Literature is a toil and a snare, a curse that bites deep.

Next, in importance to books are their titles.

A man loses contact with reality if he is not surrounded by his books.

As life grows more terrible, its literature grows more terrible.

The magic is only in what books say, how they stitched the patches of the universe together into one garment for us.

You will find something more in woods than in books. Trees and stones will teach you that which you can never learn from masters.

A novelist who writes nothing for 10 years finds his reputation rising. Because I keep on producing books they say there must be something wrong with this fellow.

There are events which are so great that if a writer has participated in them his obligation is to write truly rather than assume the presumption of altering them with invention.

A great book should leave you with many experiences, and slightly exhausted at the end. You live several lives while reading.

I just got out of the hospital. I was in a speed reading accident. I hit a book mark and flew across the room.

The only privilege literature deserves and this privilege it requires in order to exist is the privilege of being in the arena of discourse, the place where the struggle of our languages can be acted out.

Books may well be the only true magic.

If there is a book that you want to read, but it hasn’t been written yet, you must be the one to write it.

A man can stand a lot as long as he can stand himself. He can live without hope, without friends, without books, even without music, as long as he can listen to his own thoughts.

The only books that influence us are those for which we are ready, and which have gone a little farther down our particular path than we have yet got ourselves.

Definition of a classic: a book everyone is assumed to have read and often thinks they have.

Leisure without literature is death and burial alive.

We read books to find out who we are. What other people, real or imaginary, do and think and feel... is an essential guide to our understanding of what we ourselves are and may become.

Already the writers are complaining that there is too much freedom. They need some pressure. The worse your daily life, the better your art. If you have to be careful because of oppression and censorship, this pressure produces diamonds.

In the electronic age, books, words and reading are not likely to remain sufficiently authoritative and central to knowledge to justify literature.

I have friends who read my books in Greek.

From your parents you learn love and laughter and how to put one foot before the other. But when books are opened you discover that you have wings.

When we read of human beings behaving in certain ways, with the approval of the author, who gives his benediction to this behavior by his attitude towards the result of the behavior arranged by himself, we can be influenced towards behaving in the same way.

The wise man reads both books and life itself.

To love is to burn, to be on fire

Book is the new cool for the txt generation

But you can try to read books at the wrong time or for the wrong reasons.

Only when one has lost all curiosity about the future has one reached the age to write an autobiography.

Literature is my Utopia. Here I am not disfranchised. No barrier of the senses shuts me out from the sweet, gracious discourse of my book friends. They talk to me without embarrassment or awkwardness.

O livro é um pássaro com mais de cem asas para voar.

Christ himself wrote nothing, but furnished endless material for books and songs of gratitude and praise.

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

The wise are above books.

Make it a rule never to give a child a book you would not read yourself.

My books are like water; those of the great geniuses are wine. (Fortunately) everybody drinks water.

Book: A garden carried in a pocket.

A best seller is the golden touch of mediocre talent.

The whole story of the comfort women, the system of forced sexual slavery, the medical experiments of Unit 731, is not something that is in the US psyche. That is changing because many books are coming out.

I had to learn chord shapes. I bought books with chord charts. I used to listen to all kinds of pop music.

To prohibit the reading of certain books is to declare the inhabitants to be either fools or slaves.

Great literature cannot grow from a neglected or impoverished soil. Only if we actually tend or care will it transpire that every hundred years or so we might get a Middlemarch.

Deep versed in books and shallow in himself.

In our day the conventional element in literature is elaborately disguised by a law of copyright pretending that every work of art is an invention distinctive enough to be patented.

The function of literature, through all its mutations, has been to make us aware of the particularity of selves, and the high authority of the self in its quarrel with its society and its culture. Literature is in that sense subversive.

A good essay must have this permanent quality about it; it must draw its curtain round us, but it must be a curtain that shuts us in not out.

Of course the illusion of art is to make one believe that great literature is very close to life, but exactly the opposite is true. Life is amorphous, literature is formal.

Our American professors like their literature clear and cold and pure and very dead.

In the present age, alas! our pens are ravished by unlettered authors and unmannered critics, that make a havoc rather than a building, a wilderness rather than a garden. But, a lack! what boots it to drop tears upon the preterit?

At one magical instant in your early childhood, the page of a book that string of confused, alien ciphers shivered into meaning. Words spoke to you, gave up their secrets; at that moment, whole universes opened. You became, irrevocably, a reader.

A classic is classic not because it conforms to certain structural rules, or fits certain definitions (of which its author had quite probably never heard). It is classic because of a certain eternal and irrepressible freshness.

The principle of procrastinated rape is said to be the ruling one in all the great bestsellers.

Literature, as a field of glory, is an arena where a tomb may be more easily found than laurels; and as a means of support, it is the chance of chances.

Books do furnish a room.

...and Jo laid the rustling sheets together with a careful hand, as one might shut the covers of a lovely romance, which holds the reader fast till the end comes, and he finds himself alone in the work a day world again.

I have seen a stunning amount of death and destruction. Creation yes, but more death than birth. Mankind has learned nothing from their forefathers.

I keep to old books, for they teach me something; from the new I learn very little.

The party of God and the party of Literature have more in common than either will admit; their texts may conflict, but their bigotries coincide. Both insist on being the sole custodians of the true word and its only interpreters.

The rest, called literature, is a dossier of human imbecility for the guidance of future professors.

Schools and libraries are the twin cornerstones of a civilized society. Libraries are only good if people use them, like books only exist when someone reads them.

I do send out information about my books. Very few people buy the books that way, but I always feel that if they want to know more about the process, they can get the information from my books.

Do not read, as children do, to amuse yourself, or like the ambitious, for the purpose of instruction. No, read in order to live.

The decline in literature indicates a decline in the nation. The two keep pace in their downward tendency.

Some books tell us a story, while others describe the world. This doesn’t mean that one fictional account is any less real than non fiction. Sometimes the reality is so painful that fiction becomes the only medium to express what happened without losing one’s self. A Lullaby in the Desert is one of the latter.

Books are meant to be read slowly to be savoured..

That’s the thing about books. They let you travel without moving your feet.

Rainy days should be spent at home with a cup of tea and a good book.

For a novelist, a given historic situation is an anthropologic laboratory in which he explores his basic question: What is human existence?

I have two books that were published quite some time ago. I start to read about three sentences. I have to close it. I am so self conscious. Who did I think I was?

There are books which take rank in your life with parents and lovers and passionate experiences, so medicinal, so stringent, so revolutionary, so authoritative.

I tend to come up with people more than situations most of my books start with a character.

The greatest masterpiece in literature is only a dictionary out of order.

Autobiography is an obituary in serial form with the last installment missing.

The things I keep going back to, rereading, maybe they say more about me as a reader than about the books. Love in the Time of Cholera, Pale Fire.

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.

I tend to turn down books originally published as e books. As for selling books directly to e book publishers, I would do so only if all traditional publishers had turned them down.

Other relaxations are peculiar to certain times, places and stages of life, but the study of letters is the nourishment of our youth, and the joy of our old age. They throw an addition splendor on prosperity, and are the resource and consolation of adversity; they delight at home, and are no embarrassment abroad; in short, they are company to us at night, our fellow travelers on a journey, and attendants in our rural recesses.

Remarks are not literature.

I would like my personal reading map to resemble a map of the British Empire circa 1900.

Books stay with me and have shaped me and made huge impacts on my life.

Despair, feeding, as it always does, on phantasmagoria, is imperturbably leading literature to the rejection, en masse, of all divine and social laws, towards practical and theoretical evil.

I really hate those books where the murderer turns out to be somebody you never heard of who pops up in the last chapter.

I suggest that the only books that influence us are those for which we are ready, and which have gone a little farther down our particular path than we have yet got ourselves.

I have personally seen statements that were longer than some books I have read.

Books are a narcotic.

I have always read all the latest cookery books and magazines, from all over the world.

If I read a book that impresses me, I have to take myself firmly in hand before I mix with other people; otherwise they would think my mind rather queer.

I describe my works as books, but my publishers in Spain, in the United States, and elsewhere insist on calling them novels.

Very few of my books are about who stole the Maltese Falcon.

A truly good book is something as wildly natural and primitive, mysterious and marvelous, ambrosial and fertile as a fungus or a lichen.

I guess there is also an element of deliberate change involved. Each of my books has been, at least from my point of view, radically different from the last.

She should have done science, not spent all her time with her head in novels. Novels gave you a completely false idea about life, they told lies and they implied there were endings when in reality there were no endings, everything just went on and on and on.

What is the virtue and service of a book? Only to help me live less gingerly and shabbily.

Books have led some to learning and others to madness.

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.

Professors of literature, who for the most part are genteel but mediocre men, can make but a poor defense of their profession, and the professors of science, who are frequently men of great intelligence but of limited interests and education

Having books published is very destructive to writing. It is even worse than making love too much. Because when you make love too much at least you get a damned clarte that is like no other light. A very clear and hollow light.

Other people, including me, have written books with main characters who were old and rich. Or old and brilliant. Old sages, old wizards, old rich people.

Just as it is true that a stream cannot rise above its source, so it is true that a national literature cannot rise above the moral level of the social conditions of the people from whom it derives its inspiration.

There were two free public libraries within walking distance of my home; I remember taking six books home from every visit, the limit set by the library.

My husband, Nick Chiles and I wrote a number of relationship books together, and what we found was that women were thirsty to hear directly from men.

I take refuge in my books.

My room for books and study or for sitting and thinking about nothing in particular to see what would happen was at the end of a hall.

For books are more than books, they are the life The very heart and core of ages past, The reason why men lived and worked and died, The essence and quintessence of their lives.

A book is a mirror; if an ass peers into it, you can not expect an apostle to peer out.

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

Well, before I knew there was going to be a film. I was the biggest Harry Potter fan. I read all the books.

When people say there is too much violence in my books, what they are saying is there is too much reality in life.

To paint comic books as childish and illiterate is lazy. A lot of comic books are very literate unlike most films.

There is a great discovery still to be made in literature, that of paying literary men by the quantity they do not write.

I obtained a job at the Library of Congress. I loved books, so I felt at home. I was going to end up, I thought, majoring in English and teach at the college level.

There are worse crimes than burning books. One of them is not reading them.

I hate books, for they only teach people to talk about what they do not understand.

Never trust a man who reads only one book.

My hardcover sales are 17% down in books but up 400% in electronics.

Books, the children of the brain.