Quotes About Books

Neither is a dictionary a bad book to read. There is no cant in it, no excess of explanation, and it is full of suggestions, the raw material of possible poems and histories.

Some books are undeservedly forgotten; none are undeservedly remembered.

Do give books - religious or otherwise - for Christmas. They're never fattening, seldom sinful, and permanently personal.

Never lend books - nobody ever returns them; the only books I have in my library are those which people have lent me.

I hate books; they teach us only to talk about what we do not know.

In the case of good books, the point is not to see how many of them you can get through, but rather how many can get through to you.

Does it afflict you to find your books wearing out? I mean literally .. . the mortality of all inanimate things is terrible to me, but that of books most of all.

I keep my books at the British Museum and at Mudies.

If a book is worth reading, it is worth buying.

The man who does not read good books has no advantage over the man who can't read them.

Where is human nature so weak as in the bookstore?

I do not know any reading more easy, more fascinating, more delightful than a catalogue.

There are perhaps no days of our childhood we lived so fully as those we believe we left without having lived them: those we spent with a favourite book.

The walls of books around him, dense with the past, formed a kind of insulation against the present world and its disasters.

There are still a few of us booklovers around despite the awful warnings of Marshall McLuhan with his TV era and his pending farewell to Gutenberg.

As good almost kill a man as kill a good book: who kills a man kills a reasonable creature, God's image; but he who destroys a good book kills reason itself, kills the image of God, as it were, in the eye.

Managers don't have to cook the books to manipulate earnings; they often have all the power they need in the leeway built into accounting rules.

Knowledge cannot defile, nor consequently the books, if the will and conscience be not defiled.

One of the most constant and sustaining truths of my life has been this: I love the library.

I love being in the archives, traveling, sitting in dusty places and looking at books with brittle pages. I love reading biographies and researching, to make myself informed about whatever political or historical time I'm writing about. From there, a lot of the emotional truths about my characters emerge.

Seeing that we were book enthusiasts, my mother began hauling my sister and me down to the Stanton Free Library on Tuesday afternoons, where I'd find two or three books to bring home.

I have been attacked in Turkey more for my interviews than for my books. Political polemicists and columnists do not read novels there.

If I get stuck, I look at a book that tells me how someone else did it. I turn the pages, and then I say, 'Oh, I forgot that bit,' then close the book and carry on. Finally, after you've figured out how to do it, you read how they did it and find out how dumb your solution is and how much more clever and efficient theirs is!

I'm not setting out to adapt books and work with books, but when really amazing stories come to you in that form, it's really hard to turn away from that.