Every book is a quotation; and every house is a quotation out of all forests, and mines, and stone quarries; and every man is a quotation from all his ancestors.

You see, the interesting thing about books, as opposed, say, to films, is that it’s always just one person encountering the book, it’s not an audience, it’s one to one.

Books are sharks… because sharks have been around for a very long time. There were sharks before there were dinosaurs, and the reason sharks are still in the ocean is that nothing is better at being a shark than a shark.

Houses are built to live in, and not to look on: therefore let use be preferred before uniformity.

A book should serve as the ax for the frozen sea within us.

I don’t know how many good books I still have in me; I hope there are another four or five.

The book you don’t read won’t help.

You don’t have to burn books to destroy a culture. Just get people to stop reading them.

I don’t believe in personal immortality; the only way I expect to have some version of such a thing is through my books.

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

The instruction we find in books is like fire. We fetch it from our neighbours, kindle it at home, communicate it to others, and it becomes the property of all.

We are motivated by a keen desire for praise, and the better a man is the more he is inspired by glory. The very philosophers themselves, even in those books which they write in contempt of glory, inscribe their names.

The true university of these days is a collection of books.

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.

No book includes the entire world. It’s limited. And so it doesn’t seem like an aesthetic compromise to have to do that. There’s so much other material to write about.

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.

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.

You can’t die with an unfinished book.

After all manner of professors have done their best for us, the place we are to get knowledge is in books. The true university of these days is a collection of books.

I’ve written a number of books that have to do with the evolution of humans, human intelligence, human emotions.

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.‘

Life being very short, and the quiet hours of it few, we ought to waste none of them in reading valueless books.

A room without books is like a body without a soul.

I’ve never known any trouble than an hour’s reading didn’t assuage.

I don’t think about who the audience is for my books.

I love great journalism. I appreciate it. I love a good, you know, I love good news stories. I love great books. I love great articles. I appreciate them so much, and they’ve been part of my education as a woman.

It’s very difficult to read a book on your computer.

When you pick up a book, everyone knows it’s imaginary. You don’t have to pretend it’s not a book. We don’t have to pretend that people don’t write books. That omniscient third-person narration isn’t the only way to do it. Once you’re writing in the first person, then the narrator is a writer.

I’m not a nerd, don’t plan to be a nerd and read books – which I can’t do at all.

The development of civilization and industry in general has always shown itself so active in the destruction of forests that everything that has been done for their conservation and production is completely insignificant in comparison.

It is because I recognize the brutality with which my own multi-branched ancestors have been treated that I can identify the despicable, lawless, cruel, and sadistic behavior that has characterized Israel’s attempts to erase a people, the Palestinians, from their own land.

The books that the world calls immoral are books that show the world its own shame.

The creation of a thousand forests is in one acorn.

Going to the woods is going home, for I suppose we came from the woods originally. But in some of nature’s forests, the adventurous traveler seems a feeble, unwelcome creature; wild beasts and the weather trying to kill him, the rank, tangled vegetation, armed with spears and stinging needles, barring his way and making life a hard struggle.

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.

I’ve just finished my 20th book this past year and I’m working on my 21st book about the Middle East right now that I’ll finish this year. And I get up early in the morning and when I get tired of the computer and tired of doing research, I walk 20 steps out to my woodshop and I either build furniture or paint paintings. I’m an artist too.

Whether you come back by page or by the big screen, Hogwarts will always be there to welcome you home.

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

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

There are books of which the backs and covers are by far the best parts.

For a person who grew up in the ’30s and ’40s in the segregated South, with so many doors closed without explanation to me, libraries and books said, ‚Here I am, read me.‘ Over time I have learned I am at my best around books.

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

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?

Books are as useful to a stupid person as a mirror is useful to a blind person.

Censorship ends in logical completeness when nobody is allowed to read any books except the books that nobody reads.

When the oak is felled the whole forest echoes with it fall, but a hundred acorns are sown in silence by an unnoticed breeze.

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

It is a good thing for an uneducated man to read books of quotations.

There is no author whose books I look forward to more than Vaclav Smil.

There is a soak-the-rich attitude in the air, a feeling that if you have a lot of money you must have got it by some ghastly means. I can quite happily say there was never any family money. All the money we got was mine, just from writing books.

Books like friends, should be few and well-chosen.

You cannot open a book without learning something.

Our generation in the west was lucky: we had readymade gateways. We had books, paper, teachers, schools and libraries. But many in the world lack these luxuries. How do you practice without such tryout venues?

More people should read books. It’s the most concentrated experience you can have.

While civilization has been improving our houses, it has not equally improved the men who are to inhabit them. It has created palaces, but it was not so easy to create noblemen and kings.

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

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

I don’t read books much.

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

I’m always reading the next book. Taking notes. Highlighting, researching, studying. It doesn’t stop.

A 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.