Even bad books are books and therefore sacred.

The popular culture gives us books that offer entertainment but no ideas. High culture gives us books that offer ideas but no entertainment. The best books manage to do both.

All European writers are ‘slaves of their baptism,’ if I may paraphrase Rimbaud; like it or not, their writing carries baggage from an immense and almost frightening tradition; they accept that tradition or they fight...

Great literature makes a great life.

If I could change the attitude of young men toward literature, I would want them to read not just for escape, but because literature can be more truthful about things like sex, commitment, and aging....

If you tell me bad things about someone, you’re telling bad things about me behind me

Books do pretend …but squeezed in between is even more that is true—without what you may call the lies, the pages would be too light for the truth, you see?

Every child deserves to be a boat cast out in a sea of books.

I love the writers of my thousand books. It pleases me to think how astonished old Homer, whoever he was, would be to find his epics on the shelf of such an unimaginable being as...

No days, perhaps, of all our childhood are ever so fully lived are those that we had regarded as not being lived at all: days spent wholly with a favourite book.

Por lo demás, la literatura no es otra cosa que un sueño dirigido.

People aren’t supposed to look back. I’m certainly not going to do it anymore.

Look at your past… you should hate yourself way more than you actually do!”?Welcome to your Little Monster.

Sometimes I sensed that the books I read in rapid succession had set up some sort of murmur among themselves, transforming my head into an orchestra pit where different musical instruments sounded out, and I...

When The Journal of Words compiled its list of the one hundred best novels written in English, do you know that Pride and Prejudice was number twelve?” She stopped pacing and glared at Jane. “And...

The aim of science is to discover and illuminate truth. And that, I take it, is the aim of literature, whether biography or history… It seems to me, then, that there can be no separate...

So Matilda’s strong young mind continued to grow, nurtured by the voices of all those authors who had sent their books out into the world like ships on the sea. These books gave Matilda a...

Fiction is the only way to redeem the formlessness of life

Reality is not an inspiration for literature. At its best, literature is an inspiration for reality.

…the pleasures of literary fiction are the pleasures of orientation; the pleasures of literature are the pleasures of bewilderment.

To maintain your honesty , one must know to keep alive the spirit of chidhood

I wanted to crawl in between those black lines of print, the way you crawl through a fence, and go to sleep under that beautiful big green fig-tree.

A good book, he had concluded, leaves you wanting to reread the book. A great book compels you to reread your own soul. Such books were for him rare and, as he aged, rarer. Still...

It often is better to ask an ancient Hebrew goatherd, instead of a so-called expert like myself, about the meaning of a particular, biblical story.

When we read of human beings behaving in certain ways, with the approval of the author, who gives his benediction to this behavior by his attitude towards the result of the behavior arranged by himself,...

But perhaps the greatest escapism of all is to take refuge in the domesticity of the past, the home that history and literature become, avoiding the one moment of time in which we are not...

That’s why literature is so fascinating. It’s always up for interpretation, and could be a hundred different things to a hundred different people. It’s never the same thing twice.

Literature was the passport to enter a larger life; that is, the zone of freedom. Literature was freedom. Especially in a time in which the values of reading and inwardness are so strenuously challenged, literature...

I sometimes used to ask myself, what on earth did I love her for? Maybe fore the warm hazel iris of her fluffy eyes, or for the natural side-wave of her brown hair, done anyhow,...

Literature is the ditch I’m going to die in. It’s still the thing I care most about.

In order to be created, a work of art must first make use of the dark forces of the soul

From that time on, the world was hers for the reading. She would never be lonely again, never miss the lack of intimate friends. Books became her friends and there was one for every mood....

Elegir significar determinar los fines de acuerdo con la razón. Tomar decisiones era sólo escoger entre los deseos de un muestrario concebido por el apetito propio o ajeno, casi siempre ajeno

Words have the power to make things true if they’re said right.

escapist” literature. As I understand it, the adjective implies, a little condescendingly, that the life therein depicted cannot be identified with the real life which the critic knows so well in W.C.1: and may even...

Bizi mutlu kılan yaşama düzeyimiz değil, duyuş, hayata bakış açımızdır.

I look around and see that many — not all, but many — problems we’ve got could be solved if our culture simply fostered the habit of reading. Reading books of science, philosophy, history. Reading...

I have always lusted after a sepia-toned library with floor-to-ceiling bookshelves and a sliding ladder. I fantasie about Tennessee Williams’ types of evenings involving rum on the porch. I long for balmy slightly sleepless nights...

It is the custom on the stage in all good, murderous melodramas, to present the tragic and the comic scenes in as regular alternation as the layers of red and white in a side of...

[P]eople need to use their intelligence to evaluate what they find to be true and untrue in the Bible. This is how we need to live life generally. Everything we hear and see we need...

It is beautiful to express love and even more beautiful to feel it.

You don’t know anything, but I know even less.

Some people complain there are too many people on earth, Some people complain about secret societies, Some people accuse others of not being able to wake up early. Almost all people complain about something.

From one bell all the bells toll.

There is a pledge of the big and of the small in the infinite.

Nothing reminds us of an awakening more than rain.

They will smile, as they always do when they plan a major attack late in the night.

Strangers are endearing because you don’t know them yet.

Do not look too far for you will see nothing.

The universe is God’s son.