God has spoken to me, without words, to my heart. He has told me that I am to rewrite the future and remind His people's faith and to help keep that faith alive attached with the Holy Bible to Him. Go...
If one billion of you watch and do not intercede as one million of you assent to the one thousand who participate in the murder of a child, then one billion of you are a billion times guilty.
The world of books is the wealth of being.
I wrote "David" because it seemed to me that children, who can love a book more passionately than any grown person, got such a lot of harmless entertainment and not enough real, valuable literature.
To feel most beautifully alive means to be reading something beautiful, ready always to apprehend in the flow of language the sudden flash of poetry.
You cannot open a book without learning something.
The person, be it gentleman or lady, who has not pleasure in a good novel, must be intolerably stupid.
If you have a garden and a library, you have everything you need.
Reading a book is like re-writing it for yourself. You bring to a novel, anything you read, all your experience of the world. You bring your history and you read it in your own terms.
The bookshelves were lined with Joan Didion and Flannery O'Connor, a small, unexpected collection of musicalia, essay collections on Leonard Cohen and Neil Young. There was a framed poster of an exhib...
School did give me one of the greatest gifts of my life, though. I learned how to read, and for that I remain thankful. I would have died otherwise. As soon as I was able, I read, alone. Under the cov...
Nothing...They're from nothing,' he said. 'They came in the book...I found the book and inside were these flowers...They were in the book when I bought it... I bought it used...Because they meant some...
No one stepping for the first time into a room made of books can know instinctively how to behave, what is expected, what is promised, what is allowed. One may be overcome by horror--at the cluster or...
Just as music is noise that makes sense, a painting is colour that makes sense, so a story is life that makes sense.
Even in literature and art, no man who bothers about originality will ever be original: whereas if you simply try to tell the truth (without caring twopence how often it has been told before) you will...
Barack intrigued me. He was not like anyone I’d dated before, mainly because he seemed so secure. He was openly affectionate. He told me I was beautiful. He made me feel good. To me, he was sort of li...
Academic masochism reflects a metaphysical prejudice that the truth should be a hard-won treasure, that what is read or learnt easily must therefore be flighty and inconsequential. The truth should be...
What a sense of security in an old book which time has criticized for us!
First publication is a pure carnal leap into that dark which one dreams is life.
To finish is both a relief and a release from an extraordinarily pleasant prison.