Every man’s memory is his private literature.
Aldous HuxleyLiterature is strewn with the wreckage of men who have minded beyond reason the opinions of others.
Virginia WoolfA truly good book teaches me better than to read it. I must soon lay it down, and commence living on its hint. What I began by reading, I must finish by acting.
Henry David ThoreauSome books leave us free and some books make us free.
Ralph Waldo EmersonHell is empty and all the devils are here.
William ShakespeareBrevity is the soul of wit.
William ShakespeareThe answers you get from literature depend on the questions you pose.
Margaret Atwood‚Mystic River‘ just smelled interesting to me. So I read it and liked it right away. Even the dialogue in it was great.
Clint EastwoodMr. Henry James writes fiction as if it were a painful duty.
Oscar WildeA room without books is like a body without a soul.
Marcus Tullius CiceroSpeculative fiction encompasses that which we could actually do. Sci-fi is that which we’re probably not going to see.
Margaret AtwoodOne merit of poetry few persons will deny: it says more and in fewer words than prose.
VoltaireThe best book, like the best speech, will do it all – make us laugh, think, cry and cheer – preferably in that order.
Madeleine AlbrightOur moments of inspiration are not lost though we have no particular poem to show for them; for those experiences have left an indelible impression, and we are ever and anon reminded of them.
Henry David Thoreau‚Two Voices,‘ from my album with Peter Schwalm, is an intact dream-poem. I awoke one night with an image of a piece of paper and all the words of the poem written on it, so I just blundered down to the kitchen table and ‚copied it out.‘
Brian EnoThe book is not really the container for the book. The book itself is the narrative. It’s the thing that people create.
Jeff BezosI have the conviction that excessive literary production is a social offence.
George EliotIf I’m the people’s poet, then I ought to be in people’s hands – and, I hope, in their heart.
Maya AngelouLook at a book. A book is the right size to be a book. They’re solar-powered. If you drop them, they keep on being a book. You can find your place in microseconds. Books are really good at being books, and no matter what happens, books will survive.
Douglas AdamsLiterature must rest always on a principle, and temporal considerations are no principle at all. For, to the poet, all times and places are one; the stuff he deals with is eternal and eternally the same: no theme is inept, no past or present preferable.
Oscar WildePoetry is nearer to vital truth than history.
PlatoPoetry and lyrics are very similar. Making words bounce off a page.
Taylor SwiftBooks are the treasured wealth of the world and the fit inheritance of generations and nations.
Henry David ThoreauOnce upon a time, novelists of the 19th century, such as Charles Dickens, published in serial form.
Margaret AtwoodI was a chemistry major, but I’m always winding up as a teacher in English departments, so I’ve brought scientific thinking to literature. There’s been very little gratitude for this.
Kurt VonnegutI don’t understand what it’s all about or what’s worth what, but if the people in the Swedish Academy decide that x, y or z wins the Nobel Prize, then so be it.
Richard P. FeynmanMore people should read books. It’s the most concentrated experience you can have.
Vivienne WestwoodThe decline of literature indicates the decline of a nation.
Johann Wolfgang von GoetheIt 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.
James BaldwinEvery now and then I read a poem that does touch something in me, but I never turn to poetry for solace or pleasure in the way that I throw myself into prose.
J. K. RowlingBetween the ages of fifteen and twenty-four, I must have read a whole library.
Charles BukowskiThe mere brute pleasure of reading the sort of pleasure a cow must have in grazing.
Gilbert K. ChestertonThe books that the world calls immoral are books that show the world its own shame.
Oscar WildeAfter you finish a book, you know, you’re dead. But no one knows you’re dead. All they see is the irresponsibility that comes in after the terrible responsibility of writing.
Ernest HemingwayWell, if Fortune be a woman, she’s a good wench for this gear.
William ShakespeareO Day of days when we can read! The reader and the book, either without the other is naught.
Ralph Waldo EmersonIf the government ever imposes a tax on books – and I wouldn’t put it past them – I’m in dead trouble.
Terry PratchettThe undiscovered country from whose bourn no traveler returns.
William ShakespeareIt was the best of times, it was the worst of times.
Charles DickensI wasn’t trying to be an outlaw writer. I never heard of that term; somebody else made it up. But we were all outside the law: Kerouac, Miller, Burroughs, Ginsberg, Kesey; I didn’t have a gauge as to who was the worst outlaw. I just recognized allies: my people.
Hunter S. ThompsonReading made Don Quixote a gentleman, but believing what he read made him mad.
George Bernard ShawO! Let me not be mad, not mad, sweet heaven; keep me in temper; I would not be mad!
William ShakespearePoetry has done enough when it charms, but prose must also convince.
H. L. MenckenEverything in the world exists to end up in a book.
Hosea BallouThe bookful blockhead, ignorantly read, With loads of learned lumber in his head.
Alexander PopeThe proper study of mankind is books.
Aldous HuxleyBooks that you carry to the fire, and hold readily in your hand, are most useful after all.
Samuel JohnsonOnce upon a midnight dreary, while I pondered weak and weary.
Edgar Allan PoeI love a good Dorothy L. Sayers.
J. K. RowlingSome books are to be tasted, others to be swallowed, and some few to be chewed and digested.
Francis BaconBooks! I dunno if I ever told you this, but books are the greatest gift one person can give another.
BonoYes, there is a terrible moral in ‚Dorian Gray‘ – a moral which the prurient will not be able to find in it, but it will be revealed to all whose minds are healthy. Is this an artistic error? I fear it is. It is the only error in the book.
Oscar WildeEvery man lives in two realms: the internal and the external. The internal is that realm of spiritual ends expressed in art, literature, morals, and religion. The external is that complex of devices, techniques, mechanisms, and instrumentalities by means of which we live.
Martin Luther King, Jr.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.
Joseph AddisonA man ought to read just as inclination leads him, for what he reads as a task will do him little good.
Samuel JohnsonHow far that little candle throws its beams! So shines a good deed in a naughty world.
William ShakespeareBooks are to be distinguished by the grandeur of their topics even more than by the manner in which they are treated.
Henry David ThoreauNine-tenths of the existing books are nonsense and the clever books are the refutation of that nonsense.
Benjamin DisraeliThe death of a beautiful woman, is unquestionably the most poetical topic in the world.
Edgar Allan PoeSatire lies about literary men while they live and eulogy lies about them when they die.
Voltaire