Quotes
Quotes about Books
We may live without poetry, music and art;
We may live without conscience and live without heart;
We may live without friends; we may live without books;
But civilized man can not live without cooks.
He may live without books,--what is knowledge but grieving?
He may live without hope--what is hope but deceiving?
He may live without love,--what is passion but pining?
But where is the man that can live without dining?
I envy them, those monks of old;
Their books they read, and their beads they told.
It is not reasonings that are wanted now; for there are books stuffed full of stoical reasonings.
Apollodorus says, "If any one were to take away from the books of Chrysippus all the passages which he quotes from other authors, his paper would be left empty."
There is more ado to interpret interpretations than to interpret the things, and more books upon books than upon all other subjects; we do nothing but comment upon one another.
There are men that will make you books, and turn them loose into the world, with as much dispatch as they would do a dish of fritters.
The value of many men and books rests solely on their faculty for compelling all to speak out the most hidden and intimate things.
Of making many books there is no end; and much study is a weariness of the flesh.
You have to learn to be alone â no sex, not even any books. All youâll have is language, the great conserver, and poetry, the great isolate shaper. Stock your minds with language, for Christâs sake. Learn how to write whatâs memorable. No, not write â compose in your head.
There were books and pictures on display, brisk commentaries on what these men had said, and barks about their pertinence to today.
The ideal reader of my books is a lapsed Catholic and failed musician, short-sighted, colour-blind, auditorily biased, who has read the same books that I have read
I shall never again know the aesthetic thrills which, from books and music and pictures, permeated my youth
I am sure the State secretly dreams of burning books
Cunningly, Americans know that books contain a person, and they want the person, not the book
Reviewers do not read books with much care . . . their profession is more given to stupidity and malice and literary ignorance even than the profession of novelist.
I have had a lifelong difficulty in accepting physical laws. Aeroplanes fly, and I have read all the books which explain aerodynamics, but, flying, I have sometimes been fearful of the sudden exposure of the science of flight as untenable and, with a kind of satisfaction, of hearing the pilot announce that we were falling.
I split into several persons - the polite but inattentive listener, the unwilling student, the composer, the rabid reader of books unknowable to excisemen
There are two good reasons for writing much, if one can. The first is the need to earn; the second is the fear of an untimely death, which will prevent the half-formed books in one's mind from being realized. We know not the day nor the hour. I may be killed in a train accident when taking this present book to my publisher in London. You can see whether or not this happened by reading the blurb on the dust jacket
I have travelled in books ... I have read of matters higher than where castles may be and whence a gentleman's name may come
The new books were full of sex and death, perhaps the only materials for a writer
I'm only rich in books
People would buy books if they were so long that they seemed like a leisure investment for retirement
Beware of health books, you might die of a misprint.
Books had instant replay long before televised sports.
The walls of books around him, dense with the past, formed a kind of insulation against the present world and its disasters.
