Book Quotes

"Old books that have ceased to be of service should no more be abandoned than should old friends who have ceased to give pleasure"

Bernard Baruch, Businessman

"I've really written my books for my husband and our family. They've brought us closer together by allowing us to discuss things that were unspoken for so long"

Pamela Stephenson, Actress

"In a mood of faith and hope my work goes on. A ream of fresh paper lies on my desk waiting for the next book. I am a writer and I take up my pen to write"

Pearl S. Buck, Novelist

"What you don't know would make a great book"

Sydney Smith, Clergyman

"The end of reading is not more books but more life"

Holbrook Jackson, Writer

"Having your book turned into a movie is like seeing your oxen turned into bouillon cubes"

John Le Carre, Author

"I made a series of wrong decisions about moderately recent books, and I've sold the rights to studios for ridiculous amounts of money and the films have never been made. That's the saddest thing of all, because they're locked up and no one else can make them"

John Le Carre, Author

"I'm really a library man, or second-hand book man"

John Le Carre, Author

"The reading or non-reading a book will never keep down a single petticoat"

George Byron, Poet

"I never read a book before previewing it; it prejudices a man so"

Sydney Smith, Clergyman

"A truly great book should be read in youth, again in maturity and once more in old age, as a fine building should be seen by morning light, at noon and by moonlight"

Robertson Davies, Novelist

"I keep one simple rule that I only move in one direction - I write the book straight through from beginning to end. By following time's arrow, I keep myself sane"

Jonathan Lethem, Writer

"I just noticed recently that in one book after another I seem to find an excuse to find some character who, to put it idiotically simply, is allowed to talk crazy"

Jonathan Lethem, Writer

"The book which you read from a sense of duty, or because for any reason you must, does not commonly make friends with you"

William Dean Howells, Author

"The mortality of all inanimate things is terrible to me, but that of books most of all"

William Dean Howells, Author

"The great book for you is the book that has the most to say to you at the moment when you are reading. I do not mean the book that is most instructive, but the book that feeds your spirit. And that depends on your age, your experience, your psychological and spiritual need"

Robertson Davies, Novelist

"Do not suppose, however, that I intend to urge a diet of classics on anybody. I have seen such diets at work. I have known people who have actually read all, or almost all, the guaranteed Hundred Best Books. God save us from reading nothing but the best"

Robertson Davies, Novelist

"I never heard of anyone who was really literate or who ever really loved books who wanted to suppress any of them"

Robertson Davies, Novelist

"I've had the odd good luck of starting slowly and building gradually, something few writers are allowed anymore. As a result I've seen each of my books called the breakthrough. And each was, in its way"

Jonathan Lethem, Writer

"The book is openly a kind of spiritual autobiography, but the trick is that on any other level it's a kind of insane collage of fragments of memory"

Jonathan Lethem, Writer

"It was books that taught me that the things that tormented me most were the very things that connected me with all the people who were alive, or who had ever been alive"

James A. Baldwin, Author

"A book should serve as the ax for the frozen sea within us"

Franz Kafka, Novelist

"A book must be the ax for the frozen sea within us"

Franz Kafka, Novelist

"People, and especially theologians, should try to familiarize themselves with scientific ideas. Of course, science is technical in many respects, but there are some very good books that try to set out some of the conceptual structure of science"

John Polkinghorne, Physicist

"There is no Frigate like a book to take us lands away nor any coursers like a page of prancing Poetry"

Emily Dickinson, Poet

"If I read a book and it makes my whole body so cold no fire can ever warm me, I know that is poetry"

Emily Dickinson, Poet

"To produce a mighty book, you must choose a mighty theme. No great and enduring volume can ever be written on the flea, though many there be that have tried it"

Herman Melville, Novelist

"There are perhaps no days of our childhood we lived so fully as those we spent with a favorite book"

Marcel Proust, Author

"Every reader finds himself. The writer's work is merely a kind of optical instrument that makes it possible for the reader to discern what, without this book, he would perhaps never have seen in himself"

Marcel Proust, Author

"One sheds one's sicknesses in books - repeats and presents again one's emotions, to be master of them"

David Herbert Lawrence, Writer

"I can't bear art that you can walk round and admire. A book should be either a bandit or a rebel or a man in the crowd"

David Herbert Lawrence, Writer

"I love everything that's old, - old friends, old times, old manners, old books, old wine"

Oliver Goldsmith, Poet

"I regret all of my books"

Zora Neale Hurston, Dramatist

"What a book a devil's chaplain might write on the clumsy, wasteful, blundering, low, and horribly cruel work of nature!"

Charles Darwin, Scientist

"One person who has mastered life is better than a thousand persons who have mastered only the contents of books, but no one can get anything out of life without God"

Meister Eckhart, Philosopher

"My Alma mater was books, a good library... I could spend the rest of my life reading, just satisfying my curiosity"

Malcolm X, Activist

"I love the idea that we put in jokes the kids don't get. And that later, when they grow up and read a few books and go to college and watch the show again, they can get it on a completely different level"

Matt Groening, Cartoonist

"I knew I would read all kinds of books and try to get at what it is that makes good writers good. But I made no promises that I would write books a lot of people would like to read"

Carl Sandburg, Poet

"There are numerous cases of that, where one of our writers discovers another writer whom he likes, and we then take that book on. So it's a very close relationship. We can do that because we're so small"

James Laughlin, Poet

"The newspaper is the natural enemy of the book, as the whore is of the decent woman"

Edmond De Goncourt, Writer

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