#books

"It's a good idea to have your own books with you in a strange place"

"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."

"The book is a film that takes place in the mind of the reader. That's why we go to movies and say, "Oh, the book is better."

"Books... are like lobster shells, we surround ourselves with 'em, then we grow out of 'em and leave 'em behind, as evidence of our earlier stages of development."

"I kept always two books in my pocket, one to read, one to write in."

"Negative humor is forgotten immediately. It's the stuff that makes us feel better about our lives that lives long. Much more satisfying. Enter children's books."

"Her heart is so dark, if it were ink it’d be beyond black and would only be good for writing a murder mystery novel."

"I've developed a great reputation for wisdom by ordering more books than I ever had time to read, and reading more books, by far, than I learned anything useful from, except, of course, that some very tedious gentlemen have written books."

"If you`re wondering how you`ll find time, it means you don`t really want to read. Because nobody`s ever got time. Children certainly haven`t, nor have teenagers or grown-ups. Life always gets in the way. <...>Time to read is always time stolen. <...>Stolen from what? From the tyranny of living.”- p.125"

"No one knows as well as I how much nonsense is printed in books."

"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."

"I cannot remember the books I've read any more than the meals I have eaten; even so, they have made me."

"I think of life as a good book. The further you get into it, the more it begins to make sense."

"The best stories don't come from "good vs. bad"but "good vs. good."

"She had lolled about for three years at Girton with the kind of books she could equally have read at home--Jane Austen, Dickens, Conrad, all in the library downstairs, in complete sets. How had that pursuit, reading the novels that others took as their leisure, let her think she was superior to anyone else?"

"You know how it is when you're reading a book and falling asleep, you're reading, reading... and all of a sudden you notice your eyes are closed? I'm like that all the time."

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

"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."

"The best morals kids get from any book is just the capacity to empathize with other people, to care about the characters and their feelings. So you don't have to write a preachy book to do that. You just have to make it a fun book with characters they care about, and they will become better people as a result."

"Don't you ever mind,"she asked suddenly, "not being rich enough to buy all the books you want?"