Quotes on “books”

The best books... are those that tell you what you know already.

I know every book of mine by its smell, and I have but to put my nose between the pages to be reminded of all sorts of things.

I went to a bookstore and asked the saleswoman, 'Where's the self-help section?' She said if she told me, it would defeat the purpose.

Reading made Don Quixote a gentleman. Believing what he read made him mad.

Make it a rule never to give a child a book you would not read yourself.

To feel most beautifully alive means to be reading something beautiful, ready always to apprehend in the flow of language the sudden flash of poetry.

If books could have more, give more, be more, show more, they would still need readers who bring to them sound and smell and light and all the rest that can’t be in books. The book needs you.

I owe everything I am and everything I will ever be to books.

Books can ignite fires in your mind, because they carry ideas for kindling, and art for matches.

A book is a gift you can open again and again.

There's nothing wrong with reading a book you love over and over. When you do, the words get inside you, become a part of you, in a way that words in a book you've read only once can't.

I suspect it may be like the difference between a drinker and an alcoholic; the one merely reads books, the other needs books to make it through the day.

They had only ever discussed books but what, in this life, is more personal than books?

I can promise you books and conversation and all my heart.

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

I am not absentminded. It is the presence of mind that makes me unaware of everything else.

Literature is a luxury; fiction is a necessity.

I wish we could sometimes love the characters in real life as we love the characters in romances. There are a great many human souls whom we should accept more kindly, and even appreciate more clearly, if we simply thought of them as people in a story.