Book quotes
21K quotes on this topic — from poets, philosophers, and thinkers across history.
Explore further
Browse quotes that often appear alongside book — connected by shared ideas and recurring themes.
Quote collection
Follow a thought to its author, or read the full quote page.
"I had been writing comic books for years and I was doing them to please a publisher, who felt that comics are only read by very young children or stupid adults. And therefore, we have to keep the stories very simplistic... And those were all things I hated."
"Together, we can make ourselves a nation that spends more on books than on bombs, more on hospitals than the terrible tools of war, more on decent houses than military aircraft."
"Man is to become divine by realizing the divine. Idols or temples, or churches or books, are only the supports, the help of his spiritual childhood."
"The aim of great books is ethical: to teach what it means to be a man. Every major form of literary art has taken for its deeper themes what T.S. Eliot called "the permanent things"-the norms of human action."
"Inherent to socialism is the absence of choice. If I want to choose my own pretzels or books or iphones, they prevent me - they fine me, or imprison me. And those systems, not infrequently have historically, have developed into systems where there are pogroms."
"Books are a hard-bound drug with no danger of an overdose. I am the happy victim of books."
"I put all my genius into my life; I put only my talent into my works."
"When I was very little, say five or six, I became aware of the fact that people wrote books. Before that, I thought that God wrote books. I thought a book was a manifestation of nature, like a tree. When my mother explained it, I kept after her: What are you saying? What do you mean? I couldn't believe it. It was astonishing. It was like--here's the man who makes all the trees. Then I wanted to be a writer, because, I suppose, it seemed the closest thing to being God."
"One of the sad realities today is that very few people, especially young people, read books. Unless we can find imaginative ways of addressing this reality, future generations are in danger of losing their history."
"To add a library to a house is to give that house a soul."
"Many years from now when your children ask what New York City was like just after 9/11, this will be the book you give them in response. It's an exquisite novel full of heart, soul, passion and intelligence, and it's the one this great New York author was born to write."
"Of all things I liked books best. My father had a large library and whenever I could manage I tried to satisfy my passion for reading."
"The business of books is the business of life."
"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."
"A truly good book is something as wildly natural and primitive, mysterious and marvelous, ambrosial and fertile as a fungus or a lichen."
"The books for young people say a great deal about the selection of Friends; it is because they really have nothing to say about Friends. They mean associates and confidants merely."
""It’s not as if I don’t have anything to read; there’s a tower of perfectly good unread books next to my bed, not to mention the shelves of books in the living room I’ve been meaning to reread. I find myself, maddeningly, hungry for the next one, as yet unknown. I no longer try to analyze this hunger; I capitulated long ago to the book lust that’s afflicted me most of my life."
"Authors have a greater right than any copyright, though it is generally unacknowledged or disregarded. They have a right to the reader's civility. There are favorable hours for reading a book, as for writing it, and to these the author has a claim. Yet many people think that when they buy a book they buy with it the right to abuse the author."
""Patience, grasshopper," I counseled. "You don't want to seem overeager." "Right, that's why I said tomorrow," he said. "I want to see you again tonight. But I'm willing to wait all night and much of tomorrow." I rolled my eyes. "I'm serious," he said."You don't even know me," I said. I grabbed the book from the center console. "How about I call you when I finish this?""But you don't even have my phone number," he said."I strongly suspect you wrote it in this book."He broke out into that goofy smile. "And you say we don't know each other.""
"I have taken as much as six years to prepare a book for writing. There is such a delirium of effort in the production of a book; it's like childbirth. And, like childbirth, one forgets the pains immediately so that when you come to write another one you dare to take it up again. Some precious anesthesia sees you through."
