#books

"No book can ever be finished. While working on it we learn just enough to find it immature the moment we turn away from it"

"A book is more than a verbal structure or series of verbal structures; it is the dialogue it establishes with its reader and the intonation it imposes upon his voice and the changing and durable images it leaves in his memory. A book is not an isolated being: it is a relationship, an axis of innumerable relationships."

"I love the place; the magnificent books; I require books as I require air."

"Reading is to the mind what exercise is to the body."

"What an author doesn't know could fill a book."

"Nobody can decide for himself whether he is going to be a human being. The only question open to him is whether he will be an ignorant undeveloped one or one who has sought to reach the highest point he is capable of attaining."

"There was something appealing in thinking of a character with a secret life that her author knew nothing about. Slipping off while the author's back was turned, to find love in her own way. Showing up just in time to deliver the next bit of dialogue with an innocent face."

"[B]riefing is not reading. In fact it is the antithesis of reading. Briefing is terse, factual and to the point. Reading is untidy, discursive and perpetually inviting. Briefing closes down a subject, reading opens it up."

"Someone once wrote that a novel should deliver a series of small astonishments. I get the same thing spending an hour with you."

"There are no faster or firmer friendships than those formed between people who love the same books."

"The world was hers for the reading."

"You not only are hunted by others, you unknowingly hunt yourself."

"A stereotype becomes a stereotype when a significant percentage of the population appears to conform to it."

"Our private tastes in books showed a hint of our secret selves."

"Her reputation for reading a great deal hung about her like the cloudy envelope of a goddess in an epic."

"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."

"Books have to be read (worse luck, for it takes a long time); it is the only way of discovering what they contain."

"I have never been able to resist a book about books."

"Bloodthirsty little beasts. Never trust a duck."

"All books are divisible into two classes: the books of the hours, and the books of all Time."