#books

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

"Don Quixote could never manage without his patient servant Sancho Panza."

"No book worth its salt is meant to put you to sleep, it's meant to make you jump out of your bed in your underwear and run and beat the author's brains out."

"Generally speaking, books don't cause much harm. Except when you read them, that is. Then they cause all kinds of problems."

"You don’t know anything, but I know even less."

"I am eternally grateful for my knack of finding in great books, some of them very funny books, reason enough to feel honored to be alive, no matter what else might be going on."

"There never yet have been, nor are there now, too many good books."

"Do not, under any circumstances, belittle a work of fiction by trying to turn it into a carbon copy of real life; what we search for in fiction is not so much reality but the epiphany of truth."

"When you are growing up there are two institutional places that affect you most powerfully: the church, which belongs to God, and the public library, which belongs to you. The public library is a great equaliser."

"Jesus did many other things as well. If every one of them were written down, I suppose that even the whole world would not have room for the books that would be written."

"The world must be all fucked up,"he said then, "when men travel first class and literature goes as freight."

"I think that every reader on earth has a list of cherished books as unique as their fingerprints....I think that, as you age, you tend to gravitate towards the classics, but those aren't the books that give you the same sort of hope for the world that a cherished book does."

"A classic is a book that has never finished saying what it has to say."

"We can imagine the books we'd like to read, even if they have not yet been written, and we can imagine libraries full of books we would like to possess, even if they are well beyond our reach, because we enjoy dreaming up a library that reflects every one of our interests and every one of our foibles--a library that, in its variety and complexity, fully reflects the reader we are."

"I love the smell of book ink in the morning."

"Opportunity may knock only once but temptation leans on the door bell"

"There's no better way to inform and expand you mind on a regular basis than to get into the habit of reading good literature."

"Of course. You get everything from books."

"Books, for me, are a home. Books don't make a home - they are one, in the sense that just as you do with a door, you open a book, and you go inside. Inside there is a different kind of time and space. There is warmth there too - a hearth. I sit down with a book and I am warm."

"We are never allowed to forget that some books are badly written; we should remember that sometimes they're badly read, too."