Ideally, we should like to define a good book as one which ‘permits, invites, or compels’ good reading.
Books Quotes
Paradise Lost is one of the books which the reader admires and puts down, and forgets to take up again. None ever wished it longer than it is.
Though hardly scientific, (my survey) tended to confirm my suspicion that people like buying books more than they like reading them. And of course, in the famous formulation (credited to Gloria Steinem, among others), writers don’t like writing – they like having written. They like having written under the impression that this means they will […]
To enjoy a book… I find I have to treat it as a sort of hobby and set about it seriously. I begin by making a map on one of the end leafs; then I put in a genealogical tree or two. Then I put a running headline at the top of each page. Finally […]
There is not so poor a book in the world that would not be a prodigious effort were it wrought out entirely by a single mind, without the aid of prior investigators.
Vince Nasco sat in an elaborately carved Italian chair with a deep glossy finish that had acquired its remarkable transparency only after a couple of centuries of regular polishing. To his right was a sofa and two more chairs and a low table of equal elegance, arranged before a backdrop of bookcases filled with leather-bound […]
You really lose a lot by never reading books again.
Thank you for sending me a copy of your book – I’ll waste no time reading it.
My book will be praised by highbrows and will be read by lowbrows. There is no writing in it that anybody with a high-school education cannot read
Tell him that some men are more interesting than their books but my book is more interesting than its man. (He hated the public spotlight, he said this in denying a journalist’s request to interview him)
