books

"Books are precious things, but more than that, they are the strong backbone of civilization. They are the thread upon which it all hangs, and they can save us when all else is lost."

"Books... are like lobster shells, we surround ourselves with 'em, then we grow out of 'em and leave 'em behind, as evidence of our earlier stages of development."

"Books: a beautifully browsable invention that needs no electricity and exists in a readable form no matter what happens."

"I find television very educating. Every time somebody turns on the set, I go into the other room and read a book."

"Elend: I kind of lost track of time…Breeze: For two hours?Elend: There were books involved."

"The love of books is among the choicest gifts of the gods."

"When I want to read a novel, I write one."

"You see? I know where every single book used to be in the library.' She pointed to the shelf opposite. 'Over there was Catch-22, which was a hugely popular fishing book and one of a series, I believe."

"For this quiet, unprepossessing, passive man who has no garden in front of his subsidised flat, books are like flowers. He loves to line them up on the shelf in multicoloured rows: he watches over each of them with an old-fashioned gardener's delight, holds them like fragile objects in his thin, bloodless hands."

"Experience is the best teacher."

"What I will be remembered for are the Foundation Trilogy and the Three Laws of Robotics. What I want to be remembered for is no one book, or no dozen books. Any single thing I have written can be paralleled or even surpassed by something someone else has done. However, my total corpus for quantity, quality and variety can be duplicated by no one else. That is what I want to be remembered for."

"Of course anyone who truly loves books buys more of them than he or she can hope to read in one fleeting lifetime. A good book, resting unopened in its slot on a shelf, full of majestic potentiality, is the most comforting sort of intellectual wallpaper."

"One of my heroes, G.K. Chesterton, said, "The old fairy tales endure forever. The old fairy tale makes the hero a normal human boy; it is his adventures that are startling; they startle him because he is normal."Discovering that the modern world can still contain the wonder and strangeness of a fairy tale is part of what my novels are about."

"I love everything that is old; old friends, old times, old manners, old books, old wines."

"The feel of them (books) and the smell of them. A bookshop was like an Aladdin's cave for me. Entire worlds and lives can be found just behind that glossy cover. All you had to do was look."Claire (Watermelon)"

"I went away in my head, into a book. That was where I went whenever real life was too hard or too inflexible."

"You will find most books worth reading are worth reading twice."

"Thank you for sending me a copy of your book. I'll waste no time reading it."

"Thus I rediscovered what writers have always known (and have told us again and again): books always speak of other books, and every story tells a story that has already been told."

"The one way of tolerating existence is to lose oneself in literature as in a perpetual orgy."