Book Quotes - Page 37

I’ll read my books and I’ll drink coffee and I’ll listen to music, and I’ll bolt the door.

Whatever you read, read the Bible first. Beware of bad books: there are plenty in this day. Take heed what you read.

...I'm no longer prepared to accept what people say and what's written in books. I must think things out for myself, and try to find my own answer.

Standing there, staring at the long shelves crammed with books, I felt myself relax and was suddenly at peace.

And if our book consumption remains as low as it has been, at least let us admit that it is because reading is a less exciting pastime than going to the dogs, the pictures or the pub, and not because books, whether bought or borrowed, are too expensive.

Scripture is a book about going to Heaven. It's not a book about how the heavens go.

A library is infinity under a roof.

Books are the most wonderful friends in the world. When you meet them and pick them up, they are always ready to give you a few ideas. When you put them down, they never get mad; when you take them up again, they seem to enrich you all the more.

Some books should be tasted, some devoured, but only a few should be chewed and digested thoroughly.

Open books, not legs. Blow minds, not guys

Of course anyone who truly loves books buys more of them than he or she can hope to read in one fleeting lifetime. A good book, resting unopened in its slot on a shelf, full of majestic potentiality, is the most comforting sort of intellectual wallpaper.

If religious books are not widely circulated among the masses in this country, I do not know what is going to become of us as a nation. If truth be not diffused, then error will be. If God and His Word are not known and received, the devil and his works will gain the ascendency. If the evangelical volume does not reach every hamlet, the pages of a corrupt and licentious literature will. If the power of the gospel is not felt throughout the length and breadth of this land, anarchy and misrule, degradation and misery, corruption and darkness will reign without mitigation or end.

My lack of access to the real world has been replaced completely by books, and it can’t be healthy to live in a land of happily ever afters.

A writer will write with or without a movement; but at the same time, for Chicano, lesbian, gay and feminist writers-anybody writing against the grain of Anglo misogynist culture-political movements are what have allowed our writing to surface from the secret places in our notebooks into the public sphere.

A literary academic can no more pass a bookstore than an alcoholic can pass a bar.

I don't get my inspiration from books or a painting. I get it from the women I meet.

reading a good book in silence is like eating chocolate for the rest of your life and never getting fat.

Hold a book in your hand and you're a pilgrim at the gates of a new city.

I have a shelf of comfort books, which I read when the world closes in on me or something untoward happens

When I was little, my ambition was to grow up to be a book. Not a writer. People can be killed like ants. Writers are not hard to kill either. But not books: however systematically you try to destroy them, there is always a chance that a copy will survive and continue to enjoy a shelf-life in some corner on an out-of-the-way library somehwere in Reykjavik, Valladolid or Vancouver.

An American has invented a remote control that will turn off any telly within a 20ft radius. What a marvellous device! What a splendid invention! What a really helpful and improving way of devoting your time to building something that turns off culture. Next week, I'm instigating Burn a Book Week, to encourage even more conversation. I've come up with a fantastic little device which I'll call a box of matches.

The books I read are the ones I knew and loved when I was a young man and to which I return as you do to old friends.

To a bibliophile, there is but one thing better than a box of new books, and that is a box of old ones.

They have removed the struggle to find anything. And therefore there is no genuine sense of discovery. Struggle is the first thing we know getting along the birth canal, out in the world. It's pretty basic. Book store owners and record store owners used to be oracles, in that way; you'd go in this dusty old place and they might point you toward something that would change your life. All that's gone.

Most of the writers I know work every day, in obscurity and close to poverty, trying to say one thing well and true. Day in, day out, they labor to find their voice, to learn their trade, to understand nuance and pace. And then, facing a sea of rejections, they hear about something like Barbara Bush’s dog getting a book deal.