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

Należymy do gatunku składającego słowa jak ryba ikrę, produkujemy więcej kultury, niż jesteśmy w stanie przetrawić. W ciągu ostatnich lat pedantycznie zwalczaliśmy graffiti na stacjach metra, a jednocześnie wydajemy miliony koron na budowę nowych bibliotek...

Luckily, my job demands constant reading, otherwise I’d have to figure out some other excuse.

Biladerlerim, kardeşlerim, kankalar! Kolera’dan uluslararası hırsızlık madalyası kazanmış bir düzine hünerli gaftici çıktı. Bu şahsiyetlerin “Saat kaç kardeş?” dedikleri insanlar, ömür boyu saatsiz dolaştılar.

Keep your friends close, but your enemies closer.

Really, when I think it over, literature has only one excuse for existing; it saves the person who makes it from the disgustingness of life.

Now that his children had grown into their lives, their own children too, there was no one who needed more than the idea of him, and he thought maybe that was why he had this...

Finding yourself and creating a life that feels authentic and safe is the hardest, most important work that we will ever do and for girls, especially young girls, there is no one more equipped to...

Books have power to bring you glory or doom, it all depends on perception.

Is there anything more plausible than a second hand? And yet it takes only the smallest pleasure or pain to teach us time’s malleability. Some emotions speed it up, others slow it down; occasionally, it...

In literature, you either create a classical or create a foam! There is no in between!

It is a very sad thing that nowadays there is so little useless information.

The love I knew was from books..

Who’s to say what a ‘literary life’ is? As long as you are writing often, and writing well, you don’t need to be hanging-out in libraries all the time. Nightclubs are great literary research centers....

Sleeping beauty awoke at the kiss of a scientist and expired at the fatal puncture of his syringe.

Benar bahwa kamu punya hak untuk mencoba menemukan pengganti perempuan itu. Tapi bukan begitu caranya. Ibarat seorang atlet yang cedera, seharusnya disembuhkan dulu luka itu, baru berlatih lagi dan bertanding lagi. Sebab jika ia terluka...

Mr. Herbert DemarestAlexander Hamilton Jr. High2236 Bedford AvenueBrooklyn NYDear Mr Demarest, Then why don’t you give him ‘Withering Heights’? At least Heathcoat knew how to kick some ass.Chas. Banks3d Base

It was hard to love a woman that always made you feel so wishful.

Books are the perfect entertainment: no commercials, no batteries,hours of enjoyment for each dollar spent.

Is not a critic,” asks Professor Stoll, “… a judge, who does not explore his own consciousness, but determines the author’s meaning or intention, as if the poem were a will, a contract, or the...

Clarissa had a theory in those days – they had heaps of theories, always theories, as young people have. It was to explain the feeling they had of dissatisfaction; not knowing people; not being known....

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.

Hardship is vanishing, but so is style, and the two are more closely connected than the present generation supposes.