Books are a uniquely portable magic.

It is not true that 'we have only one life to live'; if we can read, we can live as many more lives and as many kinds of lives as we wish.

If you go home with somebody, and they don't have books, don't fuck 'em!

There are worse crimes than burning books. One of them is not reading them.

Rereading we find a new book.

Without words, without writing and without books there would be no history, there could be no concept of humanity.

All the ills of mankind, all the tragic misfortunes that fill the history books, all the political blunders, all the failures of the great leaders have arisen merely from a lack of skill at dancing.

You can never get a cup of tea large enough or a book long enough to suit me.

Finishing a good book is like leaving a good friend.

Outside of a dog a book is a man's best friend. Inside of a dog it's too dark to read.

There is no such thing as a moral or an immoral book. Books are well written or badly written.

The things I want to know are in books, my best friend is the man who'll get me a book I ain't read.

There is no friend as loyal as a book.

Do not read as children do to amuse yourself or like the ambitious for the purpose of instruction. No read in order to live.

Next to acquiring good friends, the best acquisition is that of good books.

In books lies the soul of the whole past time.

A good book is an event in my life.

The worst thing about new books is that they keep us from reading the old ones.

Good friends, good books and a sleepy conscience: this is the ideal life.

I cannot live without books.

Some books leave us free and some books make us free.

Isn't it strange that I who have written only unpopular books should be such a popular fellow?

I would always want printed books.

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

The love of books is among the choicest gifts of the gods.

A home without books is a body without soul.

In the dime stores and bus stations people talk of situations, read books, repeat quotations, draw conclusions on the wall.

If you read a lot of books you are considered well read. But if you watch a lot of TV you're not considered well viewed.

I love story songs because I've always loved books.

Every book is a children's book if the kid can read!

Books are not men, and yet they stay alive.

A bad book is as much of a labor to write as a good one - it comes as sincerely from the author's soul.

'Classic.' A book which people praise and don't read.

Life is a book and there are a thousand pages I have not yet read.

From the moment I picked your book up until I laid it down I was convulsed with laughter. Someday I intend reading it.

I must say I find television very educational. The minute somebody turns it on I go to the library and read a good book.

You don't have to burn books to destroy a culture. Just get people to stop reading them.

There is more treasure in books than in all the pirate's loot on Treasure Island.

The man who does not read good books has no advantage over the man who cannot read them.

Miss a meal if you have to but don't miss a book.

It is my ambition to say in ten sentences what others say in a whole book.

I'm writing a book. I've got the page numbers done.

I shall be miserable if I have not an excellent library.

Buying books would be a good thing if one could also buy the time to read them in: but as a rule the purchase of books is mistaken for the appropriation of their contents.

Books, like friends, should be few and well-chosen.

Books are good enough in their own way, but they are a poor substitute for life.

A book worth reading is worth buying.

Quote me as saying I was mis-quoted.

You cannot open a book without learning something.

When I get a little money I buy books, and if any is left I buy food and clothes.

I have been and still am a seeker, but I have ceased to question stars and books; I have begun to listen to the teaching my blood whispers to me.

Read the best books first or you may not have a chance to read them at all.

It is from books that wise people derive consolation in the troubles of life.

Books are like imprisoned souls, till someone takes them down from a shelf and frees them.

Any book that helps a child to form a habit of reading, to make reading one of his deep and continuing needs, is good for him.

The reading of all good books is like a conversation with the finest minds of past centuries.

All that I know about my life it seems I have learned in books.

The book you don't read won't help.

Someone told me that each equation I included in the book would halve the sales.

My thought has been shaped by books, my desires by pictures.

The covers of this book are too far apart.

Books - the children of the brain.

The oldest books are only just out to those who have not read them.

My main wish is to get my books into other people's rooms and to keep other people's books out of mine.

I read less and less. I have not forgiven books for their failure to tell me the truth and make me happy.

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

You have to be a speedy reader because there’s so so much to read.

The good parts of a book may be only something a writer is lucky enough to overhear, or it may be the wreck of his whole damn life, and one is as good as the other.

Life isn't like a book. Life isn't logical or sensible or orderly. Life is a mess most of the time. And theology must be lived in the midst of that mess.

It took me 40 years to write my first book.

If one cannot enjoy reading a book over and over again there is no use in reading it at all.

Books serve to show a man that those original thoughts of his aren't very new at all.

Be careful about reading health books. You may die of a misprint.

You can find magic wherever you look. Sit back and relax, all you need is a book.

There is no end to education. It is not that you read a book pass an examination and finish with education. The whole of life from the moment you are born to the moment you die is a process of learning.

There are books of which the backs and covers are by far the best parts.

The deity is within you, not in ideas and books. Truth is lived not taught.

With freedom, books, flowers, and the moon, who could not be happy?

People say that life is the thing, but I prefer reading.

Romeo, Romeo! wherefore art thou Romeo?

If love be blind, it best agrees with night.

Your life story would not make a good book. Don't even try.

The proper study of mankind is books.

Books are the bees which carry the quickening pollen from one to another mind.

You’re never too old, too wacky, too wild, to pick up a book and read to a child.

The biggest seller is cookbooks, and the second is diet books – how not to eat what you’ve just learned how to cook.

I love the movies, and when I go to see a movie that's been made from one of my books I know that it isn't going to be exactly like my novel because a lot of other people have interpreted it. But I also know it has an idea that I'll like because that idea occurred to me and I spent a year or a year and a half of my life working on it.

An author who speaks about their own books is almost as bad as a mother who speaks about her own children.

I've been drunk for about a week now, and I thought it might sober me up to sit in a library.

All modern American literature comes from one book by Mark Twain called Huckleberry Finn.

I hate books, they only teach us to talk about things we know nothing about.

Books let us into their souls and lay open to us the secrets of our own.

Each age it is found must write its own books, or rather each generation for the next succeeding.

Some good, some so-so and lots plain bad: that's how a book of poems is made, my friend

The Bible is literature, not dogma.

If I read a book that impresses me, I have to take myself firmly by the hand before I mix with other people, otherwise they would think my mind rather queer.

A book is good company. It is full of conversation without loquacity. It comes to your longing with full instruction, but pursues you never.

Great nations write their autobiographies in three manuscripts - the book of their deeds, the book of their words and the book of their art.

If many years were added to my life I would give fifty to the study of the Book of Changes and might thereby manage to avoid great mistakes.

Books were my pass to personal freedom. I learned to read at age three and soon discovered there was a whole world to conquer that went beyond our farm in Mississippi.

The books that everybody admires are those that nobody reads.

Literature adds to reality, it does not simply describe it. It enriches the necessary competencies that daily life requires and provides, and in this respect it irrigates the deserts that our lives have already become.

Judge the goodness of a book by the energy of the punches it has given you. I believe the greatest characteristic of genius is above all force.

A book is never a masterpiece: it becomes one. Genius is the talent of a dead man.

If all printers were determined not to print anything till they were sure it would offend nobody, there would be very little printed.

If I have not read a book before it is for all intents and purposes new to me whether it was printed yesterday or three hundred years ago.

The Bible remained for me a book of books still divine - but divine in the sense that all great books are divine which teach men how to live righteously.

This will never be a civilized country until we spend more money for books than we do for chewing gum.

Ideally a book would have no order to it and the reader would have to discover his own.

Words are the voice of the heart

If you want to get laid, go to college. If you want an education, go to the library.

From your parents you learn love, and laughter, and how to put one foot before the other. But when books are opened, you discover that you have wings.

To buy books would be a good thing if we also could buy the time to read them.

How pleasant it is to spend an evening in this way! I declare, after all, there is no enjoyment like reading! How much sooner one tires of any thing than of a book!

I can't bear art that you can walk round and admire. A book should be either a bandit or a rebel or a man in the crowd.

I am being frank about myself in this book. I tell of my first mistake on page 850.

Let other pens dwell on guilt and misery.

I read the book of Job last night I don't think God comes out well in it.

It's no wonder that truth is stranger than fiction. Fiction has to make sense.

If I read a book and it makes my whole body so cold no fire can ever warm me I know that is poetry.

Imagination is everything. It is the preview of life's coming attractions.

Words mean more than what is set down on paper. It takes the human voice to infuse them with shades of deeper meaning.

'Tis easy to write epigrams nicely but to write a book is hard

I have written a book. This will come as quite a shock to some. They didn't think I could read, much less write.

The best books... are those that tell you what you know already.

All that mankind has done, thought or been: it is lying as in magic preservation in the pages of books.

For several days after my first book was published I carried it about in my pocket and took surreptitious peeps at it to make sure the ink had not faded.

I went to a bookstore and asked the saleswoman "Where's the self-help section?" She said if she told me it would defeat the purpose.

Literature is my Utopia. Here I am not disenfranchised. No barrier of the senses shuts me out from the sweet gracious discourses of my book friends. They talk to me without embarrassment or awkwardness.

The books that the world calls immoral are books that show the world its own shame.

Provided that nothing like useful knowledge could be gained from them, provided they were all story and no reflection, she had never any objection to books at all.

Earth and sky, woods and fields, lakes and rivers, the mountain and the sea, are excellent schoolmasters and teach some of us more than we can ever learn from books.

All good books have one thing in common - they are truer than if they had really happened.

Sex is. There is nothing more to be done about it. Sex builds no roads, writes no novels, and sex certainly gives no meaning to anything in life but itself.

The real war will never get in the books.

The multitude of books is making us ignorant.

Through the media of films, books, music and the behavior of elders, young minds are excited and aroused into indulgences.

Books are as useful to a stupid person as a mirror is useful to a blind person.

There are people out there who will not read books, but somehow they'll read my books.

The true university of these days is a collection of books.

Preachers in pulpits talked about what a great message is in the book. No matter what you do somebody always imputes meaning into your books.

The difference between literature and journalism is that journalism is unreadable and literature is not read.

Nine-tenths of the existing books are nonsense and the clever books are the refutation of that nonsense.

I knew I would read all kinds of books and try to get at what it is that makes good writers good. But I made no promises that I would write books a lot of people would like to read.

There is a great deal of difference between an eager man who wants to read a book and the tired man who wants a book to read.

I've tried to reduce profanity but I reduced so much profanity when writing the book that I'm afraid not much could come out. Perhaps we will have to consider it simply as a profane book and hope that the next book will be less profane or perhaps more sacred.

The best time to plan a book is while you're doing the dishes.

Until I became a published writer I remained completely ignorant of books on how to write and courses on the subject... they would have spoiled my natural style, made me observe caution, would have hedged me with rules.

Every book you pick up has its own lesson or lessons, and quite often the bad books have more to teach than the good ones.

The World is a book and those who do not travel read only a page.

Men have had every advantage of us in telling their own story. Education has been theirs in so much higher a degree, the pen has been in their hands. I will not allow books to prove anything.

I can tell you honest friend what to believe: believe life, it teaches better that book or orator.

A good novel tells us the truth about its hero, but a bad novel tells us the truth about its author.

My books are like water, those of the great geniuses are wine. (Fortunately) everybody drinks water.

We cannot learn men from books.

The profession of book writing makes horse racing seem like a solid stable business.

As far as I knew, white women were never lonely, except in books. White men adored them, Black men desired them and Black women worked for them.

I am a writer of books in retrospect. I talk in order to understand, I teach in order to learn.

Many books require no thought from those who read them and for a very simple reason, they made no such demand upon those who wrote them.

Sex is more exciting on the screen and between the pages than between the sheets.

Discovering the 'impossible' ending to a new book makes me sick with joy and relief.

There is no Frigate like a book to take us lands away, nor any coursers like a page of prancing Poetry.

It was books that taught me that the things that tormented me most were the very things that connected me with all the people who were alive or who had ever been alive.

Truth is stranger than fiction, but it is because Fiction is obliged to stick to possibilities; Truth isn't.

I read a lot of obscure books and it is nice to open a book.

The person, be it gentleman or lady, who has not pleasure in a good novel must be intolerably stupid.

Books are for people who wish they were somewhere else.

Wisdom is not wisdom when it is derived from books alone.

Practically everybody in New York has half a mind to write a book and does.

Some of the most famous books are the least worth reading. Their fame was due to their having done something that needed to be doing in their day. The work is done and the virtue of the book has expired.

All humanity is passion, without passion religion, history, novels, art, would be ineffectual.

I have no right to call myself one who knows. I was one who seeks, and I still am, but I no longer seek in the stars or in books; I'm beginning to hear the teachings of my blood pulsing within me.

Nature and books belong to the eyes that see them.

It is a good thing for an uneducated man to read a book of quotations.

It was not very wonderful that Catherine... should prefer cricket base ball... to books.

Every time there's a revolution it comes from somebody reading a book about revolution. David Walker wrote a book and Nat Turner did his thing.

Upon books the collective education of the race depends, they are the sole instruments of registering perpetuating and transmitting thought.

He that composes himself is wiser than he that composes a book.

We do not need to proselytise, either by our speech or by our writing. We can only do so really with our lives. Let our lives be open books for all to study.

But I hate things all fiction... there should always be some foundation of fact for the most airy fabric - and pure invention is but the talent of a liar.

Censorship ends in logical completeness when nobody is allowed to read any books except the books that nobody reads.

Literature - creative literature - unconcerned with sex, is inconceivable.

He who studies books alone will know how things ought to be and he who studies men will know how they are.

The good ended happily and the bad unhappily. That is what fiction means.

I've been asked this question so many times - 'do you feel you need to write a book for adults?' No, I don't need to write a book for adults.

This is an important book the critic assumes because it deals with war. This is an insignificant book because it deals with the feelings of women in a drawing-room.

Books like friends should be few and well chosen. Like friends too we should return to them again and again, for like true friends they will never fail us - never cease to instruct - never cloy.

I wrote a few children's books... not on purpose.

All books are divisible into two classes: the books of the hour and the books of all time.

Every book is a quotation, and every house is a quotation out of all forests and mines and stone quarries, and every man is a quotation from all his ancestors.

A book has got smell. A new book smells great. An old book smells even better. An old book smells like ancient Egypt.

It ain't those parts of the Bible that I can't understand that bother me, it is the parts that I do understand.

This is the sixth book I've written which isn't bad for a guy who's only read two.

A truly good book teaches me better than to read it. I must soon lay it down and commence living on its hint. What I began by reading I must finish by acting.

To a poet silence is an acceptable response, even a flattering one.

When any government, or any church for that matter, undertakes to say to its subjects 'This you may not read, this you must not see, this you are forbidden to know' the end result is tyranny and oppression, no matter how holy the motives.

One always tends to overpraise a long book because one has got through it.

Books are the money of Literature but only the counters of Science.

At night when the curtains are drawn and the fire flickers, my books attain a collective dignity.

The chief reason for going to school is to get the impression fixed for life that there is a book side for everything.

A book reads the better which is our own, and has been so long known to us that we know the topography of its blots, and dog's ears, and can trace the dirt in it to having read it at tea with buttered muffins.

I don't care what they do with my book so long as the flippin' check clears.

I spend my happiest hours in reading Vedantic books. They are to me like the light of the morning like the pure air of the mountains - so simple, so true if once understood.

And this our life, exempt from public haunt, finds tongues in trees books, in the running brooks sermons, in stones and good in everything.

By burning Luther's books you may rid your bookshelves of him but you will not rid men's minds of him.

There are perhaps no days of our childhood we lived so fully as those we spent with a favorite book.

Every library should try to be complete on something, if it were only the history of pinheads.

Books are not made for furniture, but there is nothing else that so beautifully furnishes a house.

If a secret history of books could be written and the author's private thoughts and meanings noted down alongside of his story, how many insipid volumes would become interesting and dull tales excite the reader!

A man's got to take a lot of punishment to write a really funny book.

Honesty is the first chapter in the book of wisdom.

Never lend books for no one ever returns them, the only books I have in my library are books that other folks have left me.

Once I planned to write a book of poems entirely about the things in my pocket. But I found it would be too long, and the age of the great epics is past.

And they write innumerable books, being too vain and distracted for silence: seeking every one after his own elevation and dodging his emptiness.

A man in a bookstore buys a book on loneliness and every woman in the store hits on him. A woman buys a book on loneliness and the store clears out.

The Bible is worth all the other books which have ever been printed.

A bookstore is one of the only pieces of evidence we have that people are still thinking.

It's a fact that more people watch television and get their information that way than read books. I find new technology and new ways of communication very exciting and would like to do more in this field.

A scholar is like a book written in a dead language. It is not everyone that can read in it.

The words of my book nothing, the drift of it everything.

Outside books we avoid colorful characters.

History books that contain no lies are extremely dull.

There's a moment in every book when the book turns and it surprises me.

Beware of the person of one book.

One sheds one's sicknesses in books - repeats and presents again one's emotions to be master of them.

Erudition - dust shaken out of a book into an empty skull.

That is sad, until one recalls how many bad books the world may yet be spared because of the busyness of writers.

A room without books is like a body without a soul.

Another thing that freaks me out is time. Time is like a book. You have a beginning a middle and an end. It's just a cycle.

A single conversation across the table with a wise man is better than ten years mere study of books.

There was a time when the world acted on books, now books act on the world.

What we have to do, what at any rate it is our duty to do, is to revive the old art of lying.

There's no better book with which to defend the Bible than the Bible itself.

I have become infected now that I see how beautifully a book is coming out of all this.

Books are to be distinguished by the grandeur of their topics even more than by the manner in which they are treated.

Books are the legacies that a great genius leaves to mankind, which are delivered down from generation to generation as presents to the posterity of those who are yet unborn.

How long most people would look at the best book before they would give the price of a large turbot for it?

I'm clearly most well known for my music. Eventually ultimately I'll be writing books. I'm still writing articles now. I just consider myself a writer.

I'm not really book-smart.

Writing a book is an adventure. To begin with it is a toy and an amusement, then it becomes a mistress and then it becomes a master and then a tyrant. The last phase is that just as you are about to be reconciled to your servitude, you kill the monster and fling him out to the public.

With all of their benefits, and there are many, one of the things I regret about e-books is that they have taken away the necessity of trawling foreign bookshops, or the shelves of holiday houses, to find something to read. I've come across gems and stinkers that way, and both can be fun.

If you read my books, especially the Star Trek books and the Quest for Tomorrow books, you'll see in them the core theme of the basic humanistic questions that Star Trek asked.

Getting out of the hospital is a lot like resigning from a book club. You're not out of it until the computer says you're out of it.

We don't have to think up a title till we get the doggone book written.

Learning hath gained most by those books by which the printers have lost.

And the idea of just wandering off to a cafe with a notebook and writing and seeing where that takes me for awhile is just bliss.

What a sense of security in an old book which time has criticized for us.

Paradise Lost is a book that once put down is very hard to pick up again.

Books open your mind, broaden your mind and strengthen you as nothing else can.

If the heroine of one novel be not patronized by the heroine of another, from whom can she expect protection and regard?

All of the books in the world contain no more information than is broadcast as video in a single large American city in a single year. Not all bits have equal value.

A book must be the ax for the frozen sea within us.

Books that you carry to the fire and hold readily in your hand are most useful after all.

If a man writes a book let him set down only what he knows. I have guesses enough of my own.

Mr. Henry James writes fiction as if it were a painful duty.

Everything in this book may be wrong. [The Savior's Manual]

But more wonderful than the lore of old men and the lore of books is the secret lore of ocean.

In true education anything that comes to our hand is as good as a book: the prank of a page- boy, the blunder of a servant, a bit of table talk - they are all part of the curriculum.

Today's public figures can no longer write their own speeches or books and there is some evidence that they can't read them either.

A book that is shut is but a block.

Books constitute capital. A library book lasts as long as a house for hundreds of years. It is not then an article of mere consumption but fairly of capital and often in the case of professional men setting out in life it is their only capital.

Some books are to be tasted, others to be swallowed and some few to be chewed and digested.

Bad seed is a robbery of the worst kind: for your pocket-book not only suffers by it, but your preparations are lost and a season passes away unimproved.

A reader seldom peruses a book with pleasure until he knows whether the writer of it be a black man, or a fair man of a mild or choleric disposition, married or a bachelor.

Promiscuity is like never reading past the first page. Monogamy is like reading the same book over and over.

A man will turn over half a library to make one book.

When I read a book I seem to read it with my eyes only but now and then I come across a passage perhaps only a phrase which has a meaning for me and it becomes part of me.

Every burned book enlightens the world.

Fiction is obliged to stick to possibilities. Truth isn't.

Don't join the book burners. Do not think you are going to conceal thoughts by concealing evidence that they ever existed.

As an old reporter we have a few secrets and the first thing is we try the phone book.

O Day of days when we can read! The reader and the book either without the other is naught.

The book salesman should be honored, because he brings to our attention as a rule the very books we need most and neglect most.

Publishers see free downloads as threatening the sales of the book.

Books must follow sciences, and not sciences books.

'What is the use of a book', thought Alice, 'without pictures or conversations?'

A morning-glory at my window satisfies me more than the metaphysics of books.

Having been unpopular in high school is not just cause for book publications.

I don't read 'chick lit ' fantasy or science fiction but I'll give any book a chance if it's lying there and I've got half an hour to kill.

Never loan a book to someone if you expect to get it back. Loaning books is the same as giving them away.

One of Edward's Mistresses was Jane Shore who has had a play written about her, but it is a tragedy and therefore not worth reading.

I don't think about who the audience is for my books.

It's very difficult to read a book on your computer.

I am mortified to be told that in the United States of America the sale of a book can become a subject of inquiry, and of criminal inquiry too.

The instruction we find in books is like fire. We fetch it from our neighbours kindle it at home communicate it to others and it becomes the property of all.

Each has his past shut in him like the leaves of a book known to him by his heart, and his friends can only read the title.

My room for books and study, or for sitting and thinking about nothing in particular, to see what would happen, was at the end of a hall.

At some point I would like to write a book and other things but I work best when there is some sort of deadline in my own mind, but not when fifty people or fifty million people are breathing down the back of my neck.

I don't think I've read any of the books that have been written about me.

Books will speak plain when counselors blanch.

What I'm always trying to do with every book is to recreate the effect of the stories we heard as children in front of campfires and fireplaces - the ghost stories that engaged us.

Books are the treasured wealth of the world and the fit inheritance of generations and nations.

One whose knowledge is confined to books, and whose wealth is in the possession of others, can use neither his knowledge, nor wealth, when the need for them arises.

Books and marriage go ill together.

Books can only reveal us to ourselves, and as often as they do us this service, we lay them aside.

Read much but not many books.