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

All photos speak a thousand words. This one contained a library.

I suppose what one wants really is ideal company and books are ideal company.

A writer’s primary goal is to make sense. The bookstore’s is to make cents.

I study men like I study books: I skim their midsections.

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

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.

Really good books need a chaos element: something weird or inexplicable.

I care not how humble your bookshelf may be, or how lonely the room which it adorns. Close the door of that room behind you, shut off with it all the cares of the outer...

I’m contemplating if book sales and promotions can actually be rigged like so many other things in our everyday lives?

There is no happiness in love, except at the end of an English novel

It wouldn’t matter if he was a bad boy , if you got rid of your bad habit. Be encouraged

As readers, we have gone from learning a precious craft whose secret was held by a jealous few, to taking for granted a skin that has become subordinate to principles of mindless financial profit or...

When I touched her body,I believed she was God.In the curves of her formI found the birth of Man,the creation of the world,and the origin of all life.

It means the clouds are clearing on Avon.

Everything in the world exists in order to end up as a book.

My depth of purse is not so greatNor yet my bibliophilic greed,That merely buying doth elate:The books I buy I like to read:Still e’en when dawdling in a mead,Beneath a cloudless summer sky,By bank of...

Do you know why books such as this are so important? Because they have quality. And what does the word quality mean? To me it means texture. This book has pores. It has features. This...

Books wrote our life story, and as they accumulated on our shelves (and on our windowsills, and underneath our sofa, and on top of our refrigerator), they became chapters in it themselves.

Forgive, I hope you won’t be upset, but when I was a boy I used to look up and see you behind your desk, so near but far away, and, how can I say this,...

Let me alone,” said Mildred”Let you alone!” He almost cried out with laughter. “Letting you alone is easy, but how can I leave myself alone? That’s what’s wrong. We need not to be let alone....

There was going to be a spot for me in this joint, the earth, after all. It was never going to be a great match for someone as bright and strange as me, but books...

When you pick up a book, everyone knows it’s imaginary. You don’t have to pretend it’s not a book. We don’t have to pretend that people don’t write books. That omniscient third-person narration isn’t the...

Most of us do things for reasons that are more purely personal. For love, or for hate.

A book unwritten is a delightful universe of infinite possibilities. Set down one word, however, and it immediately becomes earthbound. Set down one sentence and it’s halfway to being just like every other bloody book...

A book is a garden, an orchard, a storehouse, a party, a company by the way, a counselor, a multitude of counselors.

That’s another argument for writing: making something that outlasts you.

Get someone-anyone-to read books to you. Having books read to you at any age is the supremo ultimato of living.

Books are all very well in their way, and we love them at Sagamore Hill; but children are better than books.

He passed his hands over some of the fine embossed bindings as he thought, I am a book also, words and thoughts and stories held together by flesh. We open and close ourselves to the...

Without a mission and a sense of whom you write for, you aren’t worth reading.

Share a book and you’ll make a friend!

Mi pare di aver capito una cosa, e cioè che la vita è questo, salire e poi scivolare più giù, e ricominciare a salire. Le scivolate non contano. L’importante è che il percorso nel suo...

Books are … companions, teachers, magicians, bankers of the treasures of mind. Books are humanity in print.

I was doing a show in L.A. called ‘Celebrity Autobiography,’ where celebrities read excerpts from other celebrities’ books and hang themselves with their own rope.

A book without words is a mind without thought.

I want to live simply. I want to sit by the window when it rains and read books I’ll never be tested on. I want to paint because I want to, not because I’ve got...

A homeless man visited my store today. The few quarters that he had in his pocket he invested on books. I offered him free books, but he insisted on giving me his quarters. He walked...

Fiction is just that–fiction. Yes, it is serious business, but it should also be taken for face value. It’s entertainment. It’s escapism. It’s 365 pages of relaxation.

I could not give up either of these worlds, neither the book I am holding nor the gleaming forest, though I have told you almost nothing of what is said here on these grim pages,...

The voices in my head wouldn’t shut up, so I let them write their story.

Master those books you have. Read them thoroughly. Bathe in them until they saturate you. Read and reread them…digest them. Let them go into your very self. Peruse a good book several times and make...

What a vast fertility of pleasure books hold for me! I went in and found the table laden with books. I looked in and sniffed them all. I could not resist carrying this one off...

Books are mirrors: you only see in them what you already have inside you.

Fast reading of a great novel will get us the plot. It will get us names, a shadowy idea of characters, a sketch of settings. It will not get us subtleties, small differentiations, depth of...

Without space, there is no time.

For a writer it’s a genuinely interesting and hopefully profitable era that makes a variety of books available to a variety of readers, extending both what’s available and who gets to read it.

Say No! Accept the burdens of revenge.

…writers are a savage breed, Mr. Strike. If you want life-long friendship and selfless camaraderie, join the army and learn to kill. If you want a lifetime of temporary alliances with peers who will glory...

‘Walking the Bible’ describes the year that I spent retracing the five books of Moses through the desert, and I was actually working on a follow-up, which would look at the rest of the Hebrew...