Books Quotes
No one can write a best seller by trying to. He must write with complete sincerity; the clichés that make you laugh, the hackneyed characters, the well-worn situations, the commonplace story that excites your derision, seem neither hackneyed, well worn nor commonplace to him. The conclusion is obvious: you cannot write anything that will convince unless you are yourself convinced. The best seller sells because he writes with his heart's blood.
Books bear him up a while, and make him try to swim with bladders of philosophy.
The reason why so few good books are written is that so few people who can write know anything. I've put my genius into my life; I've only put my talent into my works.
The words of my book are nothing, the drift of it everything.
I've never known any trouble than an hour's reading didn't assuage.
Without books the development of civilization would have been impossible. They are the engines of change, windows on the world, "Lighthouses" as the poet said "erected in the sea of time." They are companions, teachers, magicians, bankers of the treasures of the mind, Books are humanity in print.
Weak men are the worse for the good sense they read in books because it furnisheth them only with more matter to mistake.
How many a man has dated a new era in his life from the reading of a book! The book exists for us, perchance, that will explain our miracles and reveal new ones. At present unutterable things we may find somewhere uttered.
Buying books would be a good thing if one could also buy the time to read them…
Books, not which afford us a cowering enjoyment, but in which each thought is of unusual daring; such as an idle man cannot read, and a timid one would not be entertained by, which even make us dangerous to existing institution -- such call I good books.
What I like best is a book that's at least funny once in a while. What really knocks me out is a book that, when you're all done reading it, you wish the author that wrote it was a terrific friend of yours and you could call him up on the phone whenever you felt like it. That doesn't happen much, though.
To use books rightly is to go to them for help; to appeal to them when our own knowledge and power fail; to be led by them into wider sight and purer conception than our own, and to receive from them the united sentence of the judges and councils of all time, against our solitary and unstable opinions.
How long would most people look at the best book before they would give the price of a large turbot for it?
Digressions, incontestably, are the sunshine; they are the life, the soul of reading! Take them out of this book, for instance, you might as well take the book along with them; -- one cold external winter would reign in every page of it; restore them to the writer; -- he steps forth like a bridegroom, -- bids All-hail; brings in variety, and forbids the appetite to fail.
The real risks for any artist are taken in pushing the work to the limits of what is possible, in the attempt to increase the sum of what it is possible to think. Books become good when they go to this edge and risk falling over it -- when they endanger the artist by reason of what he has, or has not, artistically dared.