God is busy and has no time for you.

Beauty is a cheap word, but beauty remains priceless.

My mathematics is simple: one plus one = one.

To the knights of faith nobody believes.

The eyesight for an eagle is what thought is to a man.

There is a moonlight note in the Moonlight Sonata; there is a thunder note in an angry sky.

Without space, there is no time.

You mark and celebrate errors, transforming failures into successes.

Knighthood lies above eternity; it doesn’t live off fame, but rather deeds.

Water, wind and birdsong were the echoes in this quiet place of a great chiming symphony that was surging around the world. Knee-deep in grasses and moon daisies, Stella stood and listened, swaying a little...

Watson is a cheap, efficient little sod of a literary device. Holmes doesn’t need him to solve crimes any more than he needs a ten-stone ankle weight. The audience, Arthur. The audience needs Watson as...

In literature the ambition of the novice is to acquire the literary language; the struggle of the adept is to get rid of it.

Don’t forget to speak scornfully of the Victorian Age; there will be time for meekness when you try to better it. Very soon you will be Victorian or that sort of thing yourselves; next session...

More than at any other time, when I hold a beloved book in my hand my limitations fall from me, my spirit is free.

Thee, my serenity, one can not bear, Seeing thee befuddled, bereaved,Dimmed like the midnight, secluded, darkened,Thee, my serenity,A window to my eyes, A window to laughter, and peace of mind,Thee, my serenity, one can not...

The art of letters will come to an end before A.D. 2000. I shall survive as a curiosity.

Among the Igbo the art of conversation is regarded very highly, and proverbs are the palm-oil with which words are eaten.

It can also be useful to politics, enabling that science to discover how much of it is no more than verbal construction, myth, literary tops. Politics, like literature, must above all know itself and distrust...

Fransa’nın en büyük romancılarından birinin kopardığı “Üstelik bu insanlar uyuyabiliyorlar, eşleri ve çocukları var, onları seviyorlar!” çığlığını her okuyuşlarında yürekleri sızlayacak, kendi kendilerinden, kendi türlerinden utanacak, gerçek adalet özlemini bir kez daha duyacaklar.

Can you blame me, my dear, for looking on this attachment as a romantic folly inspired by that cursed Shakespeare who will poke his nose where he is not wanted?

It is the modern literature of the educated, not of the uneducated, which is avowedly and aggressively criminal..The vast mass of humanity, with their vast mass of idle books and idle words, have never doubted...

No man is offended by another man’s admiration of the woman he loves; it is the woman only who can make it a torment.

Tenis üzerine sizinle konuşmak filan, çocuğun çok hoşuna gidiyordu, ama anlıyordunuz, bir de Katolik olsaydınız çok daha hoşuna gidecekti.

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.