Quotes About Books

If you don't see the book you want on the shelf. Write it

If you don't see a book you want on the bookshelf, write it.

Beverly Cleary

Beverly Cleary

Beverly Cleary

When you write books for a living, you come to realize that while not all people who write to authors are strange, all people who are strange write to authors.

Without his books, Thomas Jefferson could not have been Thomas Jefferson. For someone like him living on a frontier, remote from actual experience, books were vital guides to how life might be lived, and none gave him greater inspiration, satisfaction

The 1920s was a great time for reading altogether—very possibly the peak decade for reading in American life.

It's the main thing I do in my life. I read and I chew glasses. That's my job. -- WSJ interview, 9/10/19

Calvin: I read this library book you got me. Calvin's Mom: What did you think of it? Calvin: It really made me see things differently. It's given me a lot to think about. Calvin's Mom: I'm glad you enjoyed it. Calvin: It's complicating my life. Don't get me any more.

I can hear the library humming in the night, a choir of authors murmuring inside their books along the unlit, alphabetical shelves, Giovanni Pontano next to Pope, Dumas next to his son, each one stitched into his own private coat, together forming a low, gigantic chord of language.

After all, is a gentleman's library of floor-to-ceiling bookshelves anything more than a vanity?

Dear Readers, Take my MasterClass. Buy my books. Watch The Poetry Broadcast. Eat Triscuits. Drink Jameson. Read, stretch, laugh, and listen to really good jazz.

Canonical books. The heretics at the beginning of the Church serve to prove the canonical books.

I wanted to read all these books, but I would have to have been in a rest home or something to do that.

In the dime stores and bus stations People talk of situations Read books, repeat quotations Draw conclusions on the wall Some speak of the future My love she speaks softly She knows there's no success like failure And that failure's no success at all -Bob Dylan, "Love Minus Zero / No Limit" (1965)

Authors produce the books. Readers consume the books.  Everyone else is in the middle.  And therefore, very, very nervous. 

You can market your book, but you can't sell your book. The only book we've ever seen being successfully "sold" by selling methods is the Encyclopedia.

publishing is essentially the same, whether you go traditional or self: write a good book, start writing your next book, get published or self-publish, market, and word of mouth makes or breaks you.

My education has been so unwitting I can't quite tell which of my thoughts come from me and which from my books, but that's how I've stayed attuned to myself and the world around me for the past thirty-five years. Because when I read, I don't really read; I pop a beautiful sentence into my mouth and suck it like a fruit drop, or I sip it like a liqueur until the thought dissolves in me like alcohol, infusing brain and heart and coursing on through the veins to the root of each blood vessel.

Lost in my dreams, I somehow cross at the traffic signals, bumping into street lamps or people, yet moving onward, exuding fumes of beer and grime, yet smiling, because my briefcase is full of books and that very night I expect them to tell me things about myself I don't know.

because real thoughts come from outside and travel with us like the noodle soup we take to work; in other words, inquisitors burn books in vain. If a book has anything to say, it burns with a quiet laugh, because any book worth its salt points up and out of itself.

De esta ciudad de libros hizo dueños a unos ojos sin luz

Who knew librarians could be so dangerous?