To my mind there is nothing so beautiful or so provocative as a secondhand book store...To me it is astonishing and miraculous to think that any one of us can poke among the stalls for something to re...
There are two motives for reading a book; one, that you enjoy it; the other, that you can boast about it.
There is no such thing as a moral or an immoral book. Books are well written or badly written. That is all.
The fault I find in our journalism is that it forces us to take an interest in some fresh triviality or other everyday, whereas only three or four books in a lifetime give us anything that is of real...
When we buy books we're fooling ourselves into thinking we buy the time to read them.
(...) and spend my days surrounded by wise books, - bright windows in this life of ours, lit by the shining souls of men.
There are people who read books, and then there are people who define their lives by the books they have read and by the books they will read. Their relationship with books is not one of gleaning info...
Let the readers do some of the work themselves
If you want to reduce the rats, use the cats! If you want to reduce the fools, use the books!
There was something appealing in thinking of a character with a secret life that her author knew nothing about. Slipping off while the author's back was turned, to find love in her own way. Showing up...
Well, I don't like the first bit and I don't know the last bit. So I'm really hoping the middle bit is exceptional.
A novel is not an allegory.... It is the sensual experience of another world. If you don't enter that world, hold your breath with the characters and become involved in their destiny, you won't be abl...
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.
Ursula K. Le Guin urges authors to remember why they do what they do. Her argument is that writing is an form of art rather than a commodity.
A great book is a homing deviceFor navigating paradise.A good book somehow makes you careAbout the comfort of a chair.A bad book owes to many treesA forest of apologies.
As you read a book word by word and page by page, you participate in its creation, just as a cellist playing a Bach suite participates, note by note, in the creation, the coming-to-be, the existence,...
A book is no mere book anymore than man can be mere man. A book was like an individual man, unmatched and with no cause of existence beyond himself.