books

"I love the solitude of reading. I love the deep dive into someone else's story, the delicious ache of a last page."

"My last refuge, my books: simple pleasures, like finding wild onions by the side of a road, or requited love."

"Even if you are alone you wage war with yourself."

"Certain bookworms eat books. Eat them, swear in them, spill things on them."

"Mother used to say escape is never further than the nearest book."

"القراءة المبالغ فيها لا تجعل منا أذكياء. بعض الناس يبتلعون الكتب, وهم يفعلون ذلك بدون فاصل للتفكير الضروري. وهو ضروري لكي يهضم المقروء ويبنى ويتبنى ويُفهم"

"A house without books is like a room without windows."

"Stranger, pause and look;From the dust of agesLift this little book,Turn the tattered pages,Read me, do not let me die!Search the fading letters findingSteadfast in the broken bindingAll that once was I!"

"There is a great deal of difference between an eager man who wants to read a book and a tired man who wants a book to read."

"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."

"Even in literature and art, no man who bothers about originality will ever be original: whereas if you simply try to tell the truth (without caring twopence how often it has been told before) you will, nine times out of ten, become original without ever having noticed it."

"A word to the unwise.Torch every book.Char every page.Burn every word to ash.Ideas are incombustible.And therein lies your real fear."

"The books are to remind us what asses and fools we are."

"When you sell a man a book you don't sell just twelve ounces of paper and ink and glue - you sell him a whole new life. Love and friendship and humour and ships at sea by night - there's all heaven and earth in a book, a real book."

"The public library is where place and possibility meet."

"A good novel tells us the truth about its hero; but a bad novel tells us the truth about its author."

"Libraries should be open to all - except the censor.[Response to questionnaire in Saturday Review, October 29 1960]"

"I wrote an edible cookbook. The pages are made out of tortillas. It’s also the Book of Love. (Batteries and hot sauce sold separately.)"

"In books I have traveled, not only to other worlds, but into my own."

"Printer's ink has been running a race against gunpowder these many, many years. Ink is handicapped, in a way, because you can blow up a man with gunpowder in half a second, while it may take twenty years to blow him up with a book. But the gunpowder destroys itself along with its victim, while a book can keep on exploding for centuries."