#books

"She is too fond of books, and it has turned her brain."

"I know many books which have bored their readers, but I know of none which has done real evil."

"I believe in books."

"And this our life, exempt from public haunt, finds tongues in trees, books in the running brooks, sermons in stones, and good in everything. I would not change it."

"Lolita is famous, not I. I am an obscure, doubly obscure, novelist with an unpronounceable name."

"If a book is well written, I always find it too short."

"There is something about words. In expert hands, manipulated deftly, they take you prisoner. Wind themselves around your limbs like spider silk, and when you are so enthralled you cannot move, they pierce your skin, enter your blood, numb your thoughts. Inside you they work their magic."

"I like books whose virtue is all drawn together in a page or two. I like sentences that don't budge though armies cross them."

"Writing fiction is the act of weaving a series of lies to arrive at a greater truth."

"I can never read all the books I want; I can never be all the people I want and live all the lives I want. I can never train myself in all the skills I want. And why do I want? I want to live and feel all the shades, tones and variations of mental and physical experience possible in my life. And I am horribly limited."

"I should rather have you than a heap of gold, even if it were very comfortable to sleep on."

"I guess there are never enough books."

"For books continue each other, in spite of our habit of judging them separately."

"You are a total stranger and you want to take my library book."

"[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."

"-- that books were mirrors, reflective in sometimes unpredictable ways."

"Where they have burned books, they will end in burning human beings."

"I have always imagined that Paradise will be a kind of library."

"To sit alone in the lamplight with a book spread out before you and hold intimate converse with men of unseen generations - such is pleasure beyond compare."

"Literature is news that stays news."