Quotes from Joe Queenan

Great writers say things that are so beautiful, the very act of repeating them makes life itself more beautiful.

If you have read 6,000 books in your lifetime, or even 600, it's probably because at some level you find 'reality' a bit of a disappointment.

Electronic books are ideal for people who value the information contained in them, or who have vision problems, or who like to read on the subway, or who do not want other people to see how they are amusing themselves, or who have storage and clutter issues, but they are useless for people who are engaged in an intense, lifelong love affair with books. Books that we can touch; books that we can smell; books that we can depend on.

People who prefer e-books...think that books merely take up space. This is true, but so do your children and Prague and the Sistine Chapel.

Because to the poor, books are not diversions. Book are siege weapons.

Reading is the way mankind delays the inevitable. Reading is the way we shake our fist at the sky. As long as we have these epic, improbable reading projects arrayed before us, we cannot breathe our last: Tell the Angel of Death to come back later; I haven't quite finished Villette.

I have never squandered an opportunity to read.

Great writers say things that are so beautiful, the very act of repeating them makes life itself more beautiful.

He used books the same way he used alcohol: to pretend that he was not here, and if he was here, that he was happy for a change.

Saddling another person with a book he did not ask for has always seemed to me like a huge psychological imposition, like forcing someone to eat a chicken biryani without so much as inquiring whether they like cilantro.

Good books to not invite unanimity. They invite discord, mayhem, knife fights, blood feuds.

The problem with the English Patient is that to enjoy it, you have to be either English or patient.

I dread that awkward moment when a friend hands you the book that changed his or her life, and it is a book that you have despised since you were fourteen.

I do not accept reading tips from strangers, especially from indecisive men whose shirt collars are a dramatically different color from the main portion of the garment.

My books have been part of my life forever. They have been good soldiers, boon companions. Every book has survived numerous purges over the years; each book has repeatedly been called onto the carpet and asked to explain itself. I own no book that has not fought the good fight, taken on all comers, and earned the right to remain. If a book is there, it is there for a reason.

books, ingeniously coupled with music and alcohol, enabled the Irish to transcend reality.

Still, it was impossible to deny: Going all the way to London without taking time out to attend a few horrendous plays was like making a special trip to Hell without ever asking to meet Satan. So this time around, I decided to plunge in headfirst. Never a fan of Noel Coward, I nonetheless reported to the Albery Theatre, forked over a king's ransom for a good seat, and watched Alan Rickman act up a storm in Private Lives.

Good books don't make you think, because the author has already done all of the thinking for you, but a terrible book can really give your brain a workout, because you spend so much time wondering what incredibly dumb thing the author will say next.

Here I am referring to the types of books that thirtyish women devour at private swim clubs, often to the dismay of their drowning children.

Books are a way of saying: This room seems to have more than its fair share of bozos in it.

A friend tells a story about taking his ten-year-old son to a Jets game. The game was being played during a driving rain on a freezing cold day, and the Jets lost by twenty points to a team they were supposed to beat. As they headed toward the exits, the boy looked up, with tears in his eyes, and asked, 'Dad, why are we Jets fans?

At long last, I felt a sense of accomplishment and a sense of closure. In the secret places of my very small heart, I had long entertained dreams of coming back in my next life as a moron.

I like to stack them up on the shelf and move them about and rearrange them according to new parameters-height, color, thickness, provenance, publisher, author's nationality, subject matter, likelihood that I will ever read them. Then I put them back the way they were.

Book lovers are engaged with writers in a private communion that occurs in some vaporous cenacle of the mind.