Book Quotes - Page 302

Like most writers, we like to find what we know and pass it along to anyone who cares. When that's done, as soon as we've said the best we can say, there's nothing else about us that's remotely interesting to anybody else, and we go back behind the walls. We can be intimate in books, we can be intimate in talks, but then we need time to be alone.

It was a book [George Packer written on our presence in Nigeria] that was killed by the response of other people. Which sounds quite cowardly, perhaps, but it was the first manifestation of what is currently a really big issue: how political correctness defines the limits of what you can do. In that sense, it was super-exciting and maybe the most magical project we did, but at the same time fraught with mixed feelings.

I cannot see that art is anything less than a way of making joys perpetual.

Before writers are writers they are readers, living in books, through books, in the lives of others that are also the heads of others, in that act that is so intimate and yet so alone.

The average detective story is probably no worse than the average novel, but you never see the average novel. It doesn't get published. The average -- or only slightly above average -- detective story does.... Whereas the good novel is not at all the same kind of book as the bad novel. It is about entirely different things. But the good detective story and the bad detective story are about exactly the same things, and they are about them in very much the same way.

A good title is the title of a successful book.

As it is she will probably turn out to be one of these acid-faced virgins that sit behind little desks in public libraries and stamp dates in books.

I am Plato's Republic. Mr. Simmons is Marcus. I want you to meet Jonathan Swift, the author of that evil political book, Gulliver's Travels! And this other fellow is Charles Darwin, and-this one is Schopenhauer, and this one is Einstein, and this one here at my elbow is Mr. Albert Schweitzer, a very kind philosopher indeed. Here we all are, Montag. Aristophanes and Mahatma Gandhi and Gautama Buddha and Confucius and Thomas Love Peacock and Thomas Jefferson and Mr. Lincoln, if you please. We are also Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John.

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

The sun burnt every day. It burnt time.

There is no future for e-books, because they are not books. E-books smell like burned fuel.

Sniff books like perfumes and wear books like hats upon your crazy heads.

Books were always important. I have to thank my father, he filled my life with books. He didn't write but he always read. He was a merchant, he filled the store with cigarette smoke and his friends, all talking about books and politics. It was bad for business. He dealt in women's clothing.

Be prepared for the creation of an intrusive bureaucracy to police the ordinance by examining the books and payroll ledgers of businesses.

Culture, like the kingdom of heaven, lies within us, and not in foreign galleries and books.

Can we really be friends with those who don't love the books that we do? Of course we can, but can we really be friends with those who don't love any books? I'm not so sure of that.

Never read any book that is not a year old.

Tis the good reader that makes the good book; a good head cannot read amiss: in every book he finds passages which seem confidences or asides hidden from all else and unmistakeably meant for his ear.

Men over forty are no judges of a book written in a new spirit.

I may say it of our preposterous use of books,--He knew not what to do, and so he read.

Talent alone cannot make a writer. There must be a man behind the book; a personality which, by birth and quality, is pledged to the doctrines there set forth, and which exists to see and state things so, and not otherwise.

The virtue of books is to be readable.

What art can paint or gild any object in after life with the glow which nature gives to the first baubles of childhood? St. Peter's cannot have the magical power over us that the red and gold covers of our first picture-book possessed.

Nature and books belong to the eyes that see them. It depends on the mood of the man, whether he shall see the sunset or the fine poem. There are always sunsets, and there is always genius; but only a few hours so serene that we can relish nature or criticism. The more or less depends on structure or temperament. Temperament is the iron wire on which the beads are strung. Of what use is fortune or talent to a cold and defective store?

My book should smell of pines and resound with the hum of insects.