Quotes About Books

Books are well written, or badly written. That is all.

The worst of it is that I am perpetually being punished for nothing; this governor loves to punish, and he punishes by taking my books away from me. It's perfectly awful to let the mind grind itself away between the upper and nether millstones of regret and remorse without respite; with books my life would be livable -- any life.

Art has no influence upon action. It annihilates the desire to act. It is superbly sterile. The books that the world calls immoral are books that show the world its own shame.

The unread is always better than the unreadable.

Are there not books that make us live more in one single hour than life can make us live in a score of shameful years?

Con libertad, libros, flores y la luna, ¿quién no puede ser feliz?

The public is largely influenced by the look of a book. So are we all. It is the only artistic thing about the public.

I'm too fond of reading books to care to write them.

A book is either nicely written or it's badly written. That's it.

I am too fond of reading books to care to write them, Mr. Erskine. I should like to write a novel certainly, a novel that would be as lovely as a Persian carpet and as unreal. But there is no literary public in England for anything except newspapers, primers, and encyclopaedias. Of all people in the world the English have the least sense of the beauty of literature.

A raznochinets needs no memory—it is enough for him to tell of the books he has read, and his biography is done.

As life goes on, don't you find that all you need is about two real friends, a regular supply of books, and a Peke?

So!' he said, at length, and it came as a complete surprise to me that fellows ever really do say 'So!'. I had always thought it was just a thing you read in books.

Bertie, do you read Tennyson? Not if I can help.

Writing my books I enjoy. It is the thinking them out that is apt to blot the sunshine from my life.

After all, what could be pleasanter than a little literature in the small hours?

The books that help you most are those which make you think the most. The hardest way of learning is that of easy reading; but a great book that comes from a great thinker is a ship of thought, deep freighted with truth and beauty.

A bibliophile of little means is likely to suffer often. Books don't slip from his hands but fly past him through the air, high as birds, high as prices.

People who read are people who dream.

I've been to a lot of school and read a lot of thick books, but at my very core there's a made-for-TV-movie mentality I don't think i will ever shake.

Reading is my only true friend.

Seek truth in meditation, not in moldy books. Look in the sky to find the moon, not in the pond."— Persian proverb.

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Her library would have been valuable to a bibliophile except she treated her books execrably. I would rarely open a volume that she had not desecrated by underlining her favorite sections with a ball-point pen. Once I had told her that I would rather see a museum bombed than a book underlined, but she dismissed my argument as mere sentimentality. She marked her books so that stunning images and ideas would not be lost to her.