Quotes About Literature

Nothing is more unfair to an author than to read or "dip into" his book before seeing what he has to say about it in his Preface.

Think of the pleasure of taking down your well-thumbed Treasure Island. You meant only to read just a little but you got to the place where Black Bill comes tapping down the highway, each tap striking terror deeper into the heart of the trembling boy in the doorway and you were lost in the story with a child hanging over your shoulder breathlessly waiting the next word. A pleasure shared is a pleasure doubled when it comes to sharing the books of your boyhood with your lad.

A health to books!... Your goblets all refill; When all things mortal are decayed May books be with us still!

I like books that glow in their own literary light — on a dark shelf, surrounded by a cloud of glistering stardust.

Romance novels: All of the passion, none of the herpes.

It was a small'ish bookstore. Yet is not any bookstore large to a bibliophile's heart?

I love the smell of vintage words, the taste of authors' souls, the feel of books a thousand times read, the sight of worn spines in line on a shelf, the haunting sound and inked-mind silence of reading alone.

Damn the expurgated books! I say damn 'em! The dirtiest book in all the world is the expurgated book.

Did you ever hear anyone say, "That book had better be banned because I might read it and it might be very damaging to me?"

Clutch some hope from fear — read banned books.

Don't burn books — let them set young minds on fire.

Books light the world — to burn them extinguishes the flame.

To burn one book is to burn the entire library.

...after having read for twelve months what these critics say I meant to say in the poem, it seems to me that I may be allowed to express my own opinion...

I haven't any right to criticise books, and I don't do it except when I hate them. I often want to criticise Jane Austen, but her books madden me so that I can't conceal my frenzy from the reader; and therefore I have to stop every time I begin. Everytime I read 'Pride and Prejudice' I want to dig her up and beat her over the skull with her own shin-bone.

...but Edward Young was a querulous old fashioned dotard...

I prefer books that don't need batteries.

Have you blossoms and books, those solaces of sorrow?

Word by word the big books are made.

No one can write perfect English and keep it up through a stretch of ten chapters. It has never been done.

It is better to have your nose in a book than in someone else's business.

Some people breathe through their mouth, some breathe through their nose — I breathe through the pages of a book.

She had never had any experiences of the heart. Her only experiences in such matters were of the books, where the facts of ordinary day were translated by fancy into a fairy realm of unreality;

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