“From the moment I picked your book up until I laid it down I was convulsed with laughter. Some day I intend reading it.”
“The books one has written in the past have two surprises in store: one couldn't write them again, and wouldn't want to.”
“At least half the mystery novels published violate the law that the solution, once revealed, must seem to be inevitable.”
“No matter how busy you may think you are, you must find time for reading, or surrender yourself to self-chosen ignorance.”
“When you reread a classic, you do not see more in the book than you did before; you see more in you than there was before.”
“He ate and drank the precious Words, his Spirit grew robust; He knew no more that he was poor, nor that his frame was Dust.”
“I love to lose myself in other men's minds. When I am not walking, I am reading. I cannot sit and think; books think for me.”
“Footnotes are the finer-suckered surfaces that allow testicular paragraphs to hold fast to the wider reality of the library.”
“The printing press is either the greatest blessing or the greatest curse of modern times, sometimes one forgets which it is.”
“A book may be compared to your neighbor: if it be good, it cannot last too long; if bad, you cannot get rid of it too early.”
“A vacuum of ideas affects people differently than a vacuum of air, otherwise readers of books would be constantly collapsing.”
“Early in the morning, at break of day, in all the freshness and dawn of one's strength, to read a book --I call that vicious!”
“If a book comes from the heart it will contrive to reach other hearts. All art and author craft are of small account to that.”
“Any book that helps a child to form a habit of reading, to make reading one of his deep and continuing needs, is good for him.”
“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.”
“The book salesman should be honored because he brings to our attention, as a rule, the very books we need most and neglect most.”
“Old books that have ceased to be of service should no more be abandoned than should old friends who have ceased to give pleasure.”
“We are too civil to books. For a few golden sentences we will turn over and actually read a volume of four or five hundred pages.”
“I don't think any good book is based on factual experience. Bad books are about things the writer already knew before he wrote them.”
“Everything you need for better future and success has already been written. And guess what? All you have to do is go to the library.”
“The book to read is not the one which thinks for you, but the one which makes you think. No book in the world equals the Bible for that.”
“Reading is to the mind what exercise is to the body. It is wholesome and bracing for the mind to have its faculties kept on the stretch.”
“The classics are only primitive literature. They belong to the same class as primitive machinery and primitive music and primitive medicine.”
“Upon books the collective education of the race depends; they are the sole instruments of registering, perpetuating and transmitting thought.”
“Buy good books, and read them; the best books are the commonest, and the last editions are always the best, if the editors are not blockheads.”
“The books we read should be chosen with great care, that they may be, as an Egyptian king wrote over his library, ''The medicines of the soul.''”
“What we become depends on what we read after all the professors have finished with us. The greatest university of all is the collection of books.”
“There is more treasure in books than in all the pirates loot on Treasure Island and best of all, you can enjoy these riches every day of your life.”
“The failure to read good books both enfeebles the vision and strengthens our most fatal tendency --the belief that the here and now is all there is.”
“Education... has produced a vast population able to read but unable to distinguish what is worth reading, an easy prey to sensations and cheap appeals.”