The book salesman should be honored because he brings to our attention, as a rule, the very books we need most and neglect most.

All books are divisible into two classes, the books of the hour, and the books of all time.

I don’t mind saying, you know, that I don’t take a salary from the church, and God has blessed me with more money than I could imagine from my books. It’s been printed all over, so I don’t feel like I am hiding anything.

When the people we love stop paying attention, trust begins to slip away and hurt starts seeping in.

I have a big following among the biogeeks of this world. Nobody ever puts them in books.

This is the first age that’s ever paid much attention to the future, which is a little ironic since we may not have one.

I love people talking about me; I love anybody just looking at me.

If a subject excites us, if it stirs our deepest curiosity, or if we have to learn because the stakes are high, we pay much more attention. What we absorb sinks in.

You see the film, you might be entertained, and if it’s not a great film, it loses its power very quickly. I think even simply acceptable books stay with us a lot longer.

I know many books which have bored their readers, but I know of none which has done real evil.

Some books are to be tasted, others to be swallowed, and some few to be chewed and digested.

Behold a worthy sight, to which the God, turning his attention to his own work, may direct his gaze. Behold an equal thing, worthy of a God, a brave man matched in conflict with evil fortune.

The key thing about a book is that you lose yourself in the author’s world.

As social animals we humans are very sensitive to our rank and position within any group. We can measure our status by the attention and respect we receive.

I have a brother and sister; my mother does not care for thought, and father, too busy with his briefs to notice what we do. He buys me many books, but begs me not to read them, because he fears they joggle the mind.

Kids are watching us. I experience it every single day. They hang on my every word, what I wear, what I say.

In the dime stores and bus stations, people talk of situations, read books, repeat quotations, draw conclusions on the wall.

There is only one thing in life worse than being talked about, and that is not being talked about.

There is no friend as loyal as a book.

I like to read books. I like to listen to music.

I don’t mind saying, you know, that I don’t take a salary from the church, and God has blessed me with more money than I could imagine from my books.

There is a great deal of difference between an eager man who wants to read a book and the tired man who wants a book to read.

Books constitute capital. A library book lasts as long as a house, for hundreds of years. It is not, then, an article of mere consumption but fairly of capital, and often in the case of professional men, setting out in life, it is their only capital.

The book that convinced me I wanted to be a writer was ‚Crime and Punishment‘. I put the thing down after reading it in a fever over two or three days… I said, ‚If this is what a book can be, then that is what I want to do.‘

The man who does not read good books has no advantage over the man who cannot read them.

Nature and books belong to the eyes that see them.

What we become depends on what we read after all of the professors have finished with us. The greatest university of all is a collection of books.

I’ve always felt like there was a lot of hype around me even when there wasn’t. I felt like everyone was talking about me even when no one was talking about me.

Outside of a dog, a book is a man’s best friend. Inside of a dog it’s too dark to read.

You stay teachable most by reading books. By reading what other people went through.

I never experiment with anything in my books. Experimentation means you don’t know what you’re doing.

What do we, as a nation, care about books? How much do you think we spend altogether on our libraries, public or private, as compared with what we spend on our horses?

A book must be the ax for the frozen sea within us.

I am a writer of books in retrospect. I talk in order to understand; I teach in order to learn.

It was books that taught me that the things that tormented me most were the very things that connected me with all the people who were alive, or who had ever been alive.

There is no such thing as a moral or an immoral book. Books are well written, or badly written.

Miss a meal if you have to, but don’t miss a book.

Every book you pick up has its own lesson or lessons, and quite often the bad books have more to teach than the good ones.

Books are the legacies that a great genius leaves to mankind, which are delivered down from generation to generation as presents to the posterity of those who are yet unborn.

I specifically did not read other First Ladies‘ books, because I didn’t want to be influenced by how they defined the role. I knew that I would have to find this role – very uniquely and specifically to me and who I was.

My priority is my books, at least at this point. What I have to do is write the narrative of this time.

Many people tell me that they don ‚t know what to feel when they finish one of my books because the story was dark, or complicated, or strange. But while they were reading it, they were inside my world and they were happy. That’s good.

Everything in the world exists to end up in a book.

In the normal flow of a conversation, our attention is divided. We hear parts of what other people are saying, in order to follow and keep the conversation going. At the same time, we’re planning what we’ll say next, some exciting story of our own.

Social media can be very effective in creating movements. In the beginning, that is how I first got attention.

Some books leave us free and some books make us free.

I had no ambition to be a writer because the books I read were too good, my standards were too high.

All good books have one thing in common – they are truer than if they had really happened.

Read the best books first, or you may not have a chance to read them at all.

You can’t die with an unfinished book.

The best book, like the best speech, will do it all – make us laugh, think, cry and cheer – preferably in that order.

I don’t write the books. God writes the books and delivers the speeches.

The book is not really the container for the book. The book itself is the narrative. It’s the thing that people create.

The good parts of a book may be only something a writer is lucky enough to overhear or it may be the wreck of his whole damn life and one is as good as the other.

All of the books in the world contain no more information than is broadcast as video in a single large American city in a single year. Not all bits have equal value.

Books that you carry to the fire, and hold readily in your hand, are most useful after all.

I went to an extreme for literary purposes because I felt all the self-help books out there were so gooey and Pollyanna-ish and nauseating. It was making me angry.

The simple act of paying attention can take you a long way.

If one cannot enjoy reading a book over and over again, there is no use in reading it at all.

It cannot be said often enough that science fiction as a genre is incredibly educational – and I’m speaking the written science fiction, not ‚Star Trek.‘ Science fiction writers tend to fill their books if they’re clever with little bits of interesting stuff and real stuff.

The true art of memory is the art of attention.