Quotes About Books

Whenever I give a talk about my work I am invariably asked who my influences are. Not what my influences are, but who. As if the gutter, misunderstandings, memories, sex, dreams, and books matter less than forebears do. After all, in terms of influences, it is as much the guy who mugged me on 10th Street, or my beloved dog who passed away much too early, as it was Giotto or Diane Arbus.

Learning became her. She loved the smell of the book from the shelves, the type on the pages, the sense that the world was an infinite but knowable place. Every fact she learned seemed to open another question, and for every question there was another book.

Sometimes I open or close the store. I have keys. I can go in any time I want. Some days, when it's my duty to open the store, I go in at eight o'clock, just to be alone and smell all those books around me. Each one is a door. Each one is a world.

All good books are different but all bad books are exactly the same. I know this to be a fact because in my line of work I read a lot of bad books - books so bad they aren't even published, which is quite a feat, when you consider what is published. And what they all have in common, these bad books, be they novels or memoirs, is this: they don't ring true. I'm not saying that a good book is true necessarily, just that it feels true for the time you're reading it.

If the keepers of books, journals, films, compact discs, and software do not vigilantly defend free expression and intellectual freedom, who will?

I could almost hear my books in the living room, boarded up in their Jefferson bookcases, crying out to me, like someone stuck in an elevator, or a coffin: "Let us out of here. We're suffocating. Let us out. Let us OUT!" And I started to laugh. "I'll be down in a minute," I said.

We read books. They make us think. It matters very little whether we agree with the books or not.

The two heaviest known substances are neutronium and cartons of books.

on being somewhat antisocial- "You have less people at your funeral but you get more reading time.

I don't want the books [...] to be too far away; they, also, have become friends. I even feel this way about books I don't own. In libraries, I find myself visiting the books I used before. I regard those rows of memoirs and letters as voices from the past, bound into books, and I like to make sure they are all there, alive and well. If they have collected dust, I take out the small towel I carry in my briefcase and wipe them off. -from 2012 NYT Book Review Essay

Books were her refuge. Having set herself to learn the Russian language, she read every Russian book she could find. But French was the language she preferred, and she read French books indiscriminately, picking up whatever her ladies-in-waiting happened to be reading. She always kept a book in her room and carried another in her pocket.

I am a bookworm. For play, I bury myself in the corners of libraries and read.

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

I kept always two books in my pocket, one to read, one to write in.

We can put it in its proper perspective by supposing that Gutenberg's great invention had been directed at printing only comic books.

He always wrote on the flyleaf of each new book the date and where he was, so I can follow him: reading Chesterton just after they were married in November 1929, Scottish poets the following spring.

Until lately the West has regarded it as self-evident that the road to education lay through great books. No man was educated unless he was acquainted with the masterpieces of his tradition. There never was very much doubt in anybody's mind about which the masterpieces were. They were the books that had endured and that the common voice of mankind called the finest creations, in writing, of the Western mind.

I am constructing here a commonsensical book from which nothing at all can be learned. There are, to be sure, persons who wish to extract from books guiding principles for their lives. For this most estimable individual I am therefore, to my gigantic regret, not writing. Is that a pity? Oh yes. O you driest, most upright, virtuous and respectable, kindest, quietest of adventurers- slumber sweetly, for the while.

We never stop reading, although every book comes to an end, just as we never stop living, although death is certain

Books are finite, sexual encounters are finite, but the desire to read and to fuck is infinite; it surpasses our own deaths, our fears, our hopes for peace.

ogni vero editore compone, senza saperlo o anche sapendolo, un unico libro formato da tutti i libri che pubblica

Mostrare la propria libreria è come far entrare un estraneo nell'intimità. È come raccontare dei propri flirt. Una cosa da evitare.

I never heard of anyone who was really literate or who ever really loved books who wanted to suppress any of them.

Nothing is more dangerous to maidenly delicacy of speech than the run of a good library.