Books Quotes

Just give me a comfortable couch, a dog, a good book, and a woman. Then if you can get the dog to go somewhere and read the book, I might have a little fun.

Get books, sit yourself down anywhere, and go to reading them yourself.

The heroic books, even if printed in the character of our mother tongue, will always be in a language dead to degenerate times; and we must laboriously seek the meaning of each word and line, conjecturing a larger sense than common use permits out of what wisdom and valor and generosity we have. The modern cheap and fertile press, with all its translations, has done little to bring us nearer to the heroic writers of antiquity. They seem as solitary, and the letter in which they are printed as rare and curious, as ever.

I have now a library of nearly nine hundred volumes, over seven hundred of which I wrote myself.

Wat a vast fertility of pleasure books hold for me! I went in and found the table laden with books. I looked in and sniffed them all. I could not resist carrying this one off and broaching it. I think I could happily live here and read forever.

Any book that helps a child to form a habit of reading, to make reading one of his deep and continuing needs, is good for him.

It is a relief to read some true book, wherein all are equally dead,--equally alive. I think the best parts of Shakespeare would only be enhanced by the most thrilling and affecting events. I have found it so. And so much the more, as they are not intended for consolation.

I have my books and my poetry to protect me

Day, after day, after glorious day, I was falling in love with books.

Remember, the firemen are rarely necessary. The public itself stopped reading of its own accord.

Do you ever read any of the books you burn?" He laughed. "That's against the law!" "Oh. Of course.

I never read a novel, they have so little real life and thought in them.

Most of the classical citations you shall hear or read in the current journals or speeches were not drawn from the originals, but from previous quotations in English books.

He never went out without a book under his arm, and he often came back with two.

In the first place, all books that get fairly into the vital air of the world were written by the successful class, by the affirming and advancing class, who utter what tens of thousands feel though they cannot say.

Without books, I would certainly die.

I do not remember a time since I have been capable of loving books that I have not loved Shakespeare.

If one cannot enjoy reading a book over and over again, there is no use in reading it at all.

Pilgrim's Progress , about a man that left his family, it didn't say why. I read considerable in it now and then. The statements was interesting, but tough.

... bums on the outside, libraries inside.

I have at last come to the end of the Faerie Queene: and though I say "at last", I almost wish he had lived to write six books more as he had hoped to do — so much have I enjoyed it.

I cannot choose one hundred best books because I have only written five

The book exists for us perchance which will explain our miracles and and reveal new ones. The at present unutterable things we may find somewhere uttered. These same questions that disturb and puzzle and confound us have in their turn occurred to all the wise men; not one has been omitted; and each has answered them, according to his ability, by his words and his life.

Books must be read as deliberately and reservedly as they were written.

Writing books isn't a drastic departure from writing for the stage.

The chief knowledge that's man on from reading books is the knowledge that very few of them are worth reading.

I've only written one science-fiction book: 'Fahrenheit 451.' That book is a book based on real facts and my hatred of people who destroy books.

There is nothing on earth more exquisite than a bonny book, with well-placed columns of rich black writing in beautiful borders, and illuminated pictures cunningly inset. But nowadays, instead of looking at books, people read them. A book might as well be one of those orders for bacon and bran.

It seems to me that to take a book of mine into his hands is one of the rarest distinctions that anyone can confer upon himself. I even assume that he removes his shoes when he does so-not to speak of boots.

I devoured Gibbon. I rode triumphantly through it from end to end and enjoyed it all.

Books that are books are all that you want, and there are but a half dozen in any thousand.

People die, but books never die. No man and no force can abolish memory.

In a good bookroom you feel in some mysterious way that you are absorbing the wisdom contained in all the books through your skin, without even opening them.

When rivers flooded, when fire fell from the sky, what a fine place the library was, the many rooms, the books. With luck, no one found you. How could they!--when you were off to Tanganyika in '98, Cairo in 1812, Florence in 1492!?

One feels like crawling on all fours after reading your work.

In old days books were written by men of letters and read by the public. Nowadays books are written by the public and read by nobody.

The moment when the finished book or, better yet, a tightly packed carton of finished books arrives on my doorstep is the moment of truth, of culmination; its bliss lasts as much as five minutes, until the first typographical error or production flaw is noticed.

This book should be read as one would read the book of a dead man.

The best books... are those that tell you what you know already.

Shut the door, they're coming through the window, shut the window, they're coming through the door," are the words to an old song. They fit my lifestyle with newly arriving butcher/censors every month. Only six weeks ago, I discovered that, over the years, some cubby-hole editors at Ballantine Books, fearful of contaminating the young, had, bit by bit, censored some 75 separate sections from the novel. Students, reading the novel which, after all, deals with censorship and book-burning in the future, write to tell me of this exquisite irony.

[His] library was a fine dark place bricked with books, so anything could happen there and always did. All you had to do was pull a book from the shelf and open it and suddenly the darkness was not so dark anymore.

Men over forty are no judges of a book written in a new spirit.

The book salesman should be honored because he brings to our attention, as a rule, the very books we need most and neglect most.

To read well, that is, to read true books in a true spirit, is a noble exercise, and one that will tax the reader more than any exercise which the customs of the day esteem. It requires a training such as the athletes underwent, the steady intention almost of the whole life to this object. Books must be read as deliberately and reservedly as they were written.

Classics which at home are drowsily read have a strange charm in a country inn, or in the transom of a merchant brig.

One can never read too little of bad, or too much of good books: bad books are intellectual poison; they destroy the mind. In order to read what is good one must make it a condition never to read what is bad; for life is short, and both time and strength limited.

Books, in all their variety, offer the human intellect the means whereby civilisation may be carried triumphantly forward.

Those who find ugly meanings in beautiful things are corrupt without being charming. This is a fault. Those who find beautiful meanings in beautiful things are the cultivated. For these there is hope. They are the elect to whom beautiful things mean only Beauty. There is no such thing as a moral or an immoral book. Books are well written, or badly written. That is all.

At least let us have healthy books.

I knew there was a way out. I knew there was another kind of life because I had read about it. I knew there were other places, and there was another way of being.

O, let my books be then the eloquenceAnd dumb presagers of my speaking breast,Who plead for love, and look for recompense,More than that tongue that more hath more expressed.

A book is a loaded gun in the house next door...Who knows who might be the target of the well-read man?

But the feeling I have, you know, is that I'll never come close to reading all, or even a thousandth- a billionth- of the books I'd probably love if I ever got to them.

Some things definitely work better on film than in books. Introspection is great in books but it doesn't work on film. Anything with high intensity, whether it's a love scene, a car chase, a fight scene - those things work so well on film and oftentimes they can tell a much broader part of the story.

Keep away from books and from men who get their ideas from books, and your own books will always be fresh.

There ain't anything that is so interesting to look at as a place that a book has talked about.

I remember, when I was a child and wrote poems in little clasped books, I used to kiss the books and put them away tenderly because I had been happy near them, and take them out by turns when I was going from home, to cheer them by the change of air and the pleasure of the new place. This, not for the sake of the verses written in them, and not for the sake of writing more verses in them, but from pure gratitude.

Cheap editions of great books may be delightful, but cheap editions of great men are absolutely detestable

I would welcome a friendship with Lynne Hinton. I would welcome an invitation to sit down at her table, but mostly I would welcome her next book.

For books are more than books, they are the life, the very heart and core of ages past, the reason why men worked and died, the essence and quintessence of their lives.