#books

"That's what this country needs -- more books!"

"I care more about the people in books than the people I see every day."

"If anything attacked us, we could just panic at it until it went away."

"We need the books that affect us like a disaster, that grieve us deeply, like the death of someone we loved more than ourselves, like being banished into forests far from everyone, like a suicide. A book must be the axe for the frozen sea inside us."

"Experience is the best teacher."

"I attempted briefly to consecrate myself in the public library, believing every crack in my soul could be chinked with a book."

"Woe be to him that reads but one book."

"A novel is not an allegory.... It is the sensual experience of another world. If you don't enter that world, hold your breath with the characters and become involved in their destiny, you won't be able to empathize, and empathy is at the heart of the novel. This is how you read a novel: you inhale the experience. So start breathing."

"لو سُئلت :ماالذي تتمنى أن تشربه دون أن تفيق ؟، لقلت : عصير الكتب ، خلاصة الفكر ، مسحوق الفلسفة"

"Good friends, good books, and a sleepy conscience: this is the ideal life."

"My books hold between their covers every story I've ever known and still remember, or have now forgotten, or may one day read; they fill the space around me with ancient and new voices."

"But the not-very-highbrow truth of the matter was that the reading was how I got my ya-yas out.For the sake of my bookish reputation I upgraded to Tolstoy and Steinbeck before I understood them, but my dark secret was that really, I preferred the junk. The Dragonriders of Pern, Flowers in the Attic, The Clan of the Cave Bear. This stuff was like my stash of Playboys under the mattress."

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

"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."

"Literary detection and firearms don't really go hand in hand; pen mighter than the sword and so forth."

"Always read stuff that will make you look good if you die in the middle of it."

"Give a man a hoe and he is something to exploit. Give him a book and he is something to fear."

"I believe that today more than ever a book should be sought after even if it has only one great page in it. We must search for fragments, splinters, toenails, anything that has ore in it, anything that is capable of resuscitating the body and the soul."

"The taste for books was an early one. As a child he was sometimes found at midnight by a page still reading. They took his taper away, and he bred glow-worms to serve his purpose. They took the glow-worms away and he almost burnt the house down with a tinder."

"Where should I go?"-Alice. "That depends on where you want to end up."- The Cheshire Cat."