Quotes About Books

Your list of suspects, of course. Don't you watch TV? Don't you read books? How do you expect to solve a mystery if you're not keeping a list?

Unless their use by readers bring them to life, books are indeed dead things.

Books themselves need no defense. Their spokesmen come and go, their readers live and die, they remain constant.

I have always been reconciled to the fact that I was born a bibliomaniac, never have I sought a cure, and my dearest friends have been drawn from those likewise suffering from book madness.

just want to read more books and be a knowledgeable female.

A few of my books, over the years, have been optioned for film. The subject matter of my books, however, is not exactly conducive to Hollywood film treatment. If and when a 'big-budget' film is ever made based on one of my books, my fans and I will more than likely loathe it because it won't be true to its source. That's almost a given.

I grew up in a completely bookless household. It was my father's boast that he had never read a book from end to end. I don't remember any of his ladies being bookish. So I was entirely dependent on my schoolteachers for my early reading with the exception of The Wind in the Willows, which a stepmother read to me when I was in hospital.

You know, I don't think a lot about why one book connects with its readers and another doesn't. Probably because I don't want to start thinking, "Am I popular?" I spent way too much time thinking about that in high school.

Children know perfectly well that unicorns aren't real, but they also know that books about unicorns, if they are good books, are true books.

A self without a shelf remains cryptic; a home without books naked.

People sometimes act as though owning books you haven't read constitutes a charade or pretense, but for me, there's a lovely mystery and pregnancy about a book that hasn't given itself over to you yet--sometimes I'm the most inspired by imagining what the contents of an unread book might be. ~ Jonathan Lethem, author of The Fortress of Solitude

Just as television didn't put an end to radio or the movies (to say nothing of books), I don't think e-books will put an end to hard copies, even for someone like me who loves technology and does not fetishize the physical medium of books. ~ Steven Pinker, author of The Lauguage Instinct, How the Mind Works The Blank Slate and The Stuff of Thought: Language as a Window into Human Nature.

I do lend my books, but I have to be a bit selective because my marginalia are so incriminating." --Alison Bechdel

I hate lending, or borrowing—if you want me to read a book, tell me about it, or buy me a copy outright. Your loaned edition sits in my house like a real grievance. And in lieu of lending books, I buy extra copies of those I want to give away, which gives me the added pleasure of buying books I love again and again." --Jonathan Lethem

Correction of Earlier Entry: 8/01/12 We read over the shoulders of giants; books place us in dialogue not just with an author but with other readers.

There is a simple rule: practice a kind of generous selfishness. Give a book to a friend, but don't lend it, because you will never get it back. ~ James Wood, author of The Book Against God.

I feel that my tendency to acquire books is rather like someone smoking two packs a day: it's a terrible vice that I wish I could shuck. I love my books, and with all their dog-ears and underlinings they are irreplaceable; but I sometimes wish they'd just vanish. ~ Claire Messud, author of The Emperor's Child.

The second I learned to read in first grade, when I was 5, I preferred it to life. And I still do.

Ever since I was a little child, I refused to see movies of books that I loved. Because you already know what Heidi looks like and she doesn't look like Shirley Temple.

When I was very little, say five or six, I became aware of the fact that people wrote books. Before that, I thought that God wrote books. I thought a book was a manifestation of nature, like a tree. When my mother explained it, I kept after her: What are you saying? What do you mean? I couldn't believe it. It was astonishing. It was like--here's the man who makes all the trees. Then I wanted to be a writer, because, I suppose, it seemed the closest thing to being God.

Arigatou very much" he said. They often mixed up words in different languages as a joke. Book 3, p392

I never thought that Spider-Man would become the world wide icon that he is. I just hoped the books would sell and I'd keep my job.

I entrench myself in books equally against sorrow and the weather.

English humorist Alan Coren was surely wrong when he said that the only books guaranteed to sell well were those about cats, golf and the Third Reich. His book Golfing for Cats, adorned with a Swastika, could also have done with some Peak-Oil pie-charts and a centerfold pull-out of a topless Martin Heidegger.