#books

"I had found a new friend. The surprising thing is where I’d found him – not up a tree or sulking in the shade, or splashing around in one of the hill streams, but in a book. No one had told us kids to look there for a friend. Or that you could slip inside the skin of another. Or travel to another place with marshes, and where, to our ears, the bad people spoke like pirates."

"I’m a book lover. I’ve probably already fucked a whole library."

"A book is as private and consensual as sex."

"Just like heaven. Ever’body wants a little piece of lan’. I read plenty of books out here. Nobody never gets to heaven, and nobody gets no land. It’s just in their head. They’re all the time talkin’ about it, but it’s jus’ in their head."

"Finally, from so little sleeping and so much reading, his brain dried up and he went completely out of his mind."

"I'm trying to undermine the basis of Christian belief... I'm not in the business of offending people. I find the books upholding certain values that I think are important, such as life is immensely valuable and this world is an extraordinarily beautiful place. We should do what we can to increase the amount of wisdom in the world.[Washington Post interview, 19 February 2001]"

"He started to look at me in a manner I recognized: it was the way I looked at a new book, one I had never read before, one that surprised me with all it had to say."

"A well-composed book is a magic carpet on which we are wafted to a world that we cannot enter in any other way."

"There must be something in books, something we can’t imagine, to make a woman stay in a burning house; there must be something there. You don’t stay for nothing."

"Sometimes I think books are the only friends worth having."

"We owe it to each other to tell stories."

"Dear and most respected bookcase! I welcome your existence, which has for over one hundred years been devoted to the radiant ideals of goodness and justice."

"Even bad books are books and therefore sacred."

"Words dazzle and deceive because they are mimed by the face. But black words on a white page are the soul laid bare."

"Sir,’ said Stephen, ‘I read novels with the utmost pertinacity. I look upon them--I look upon good novels--as a very valuable part of literature, conveying more exact and finely-distinguished knowledge of the human heart and mind than almost any other, with greater breadth and depth and fewer constraints."

"When writers die they become books, which is, after all, not too bad an incarnation."[As attributed by Alastair Reid in Neruda and Borges, The New Yorker, June 24, 1996; as well as in The Talk of the Town, The New Yorker, July 7, 1986]"

"It doesn't matter. I have books, new books, and I can bear anything as long as there are books."

"‎"Based on a true story"? No, thanks. I prefer "based on a true imagination"."

"A truly great book should be read in youth, again in maturity and once more in old age, as a fine building should be seen by morning light, at noon and by moonlight."

"If you don’t like to read, you haven’t found the right book."