Books Quotes
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I've written five books, a book every three years. I'm fairly lazy and it doesn't take that much...people who are not lazy are Isaac Asimov.
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Books are only the shadow and life the real thing. I believe this as strongly as any belief I hold.
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There are some advantages to being a writer: you do generally get better as you get older. I think I understand things better. When I was a kid, I was kind of guessing at the emotion. Now I'm interested in writing more difficult books, books that confront the facts of life, of death and dying and failure - the majority of life. You write outwardly imaginative books when you're younger. When you're older you apply imagination to internal experience.
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My work stops at publication. If the books don't contain in themselves their reasons for being - questions and answers - it means I was wrong to have them published.
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And books that were published in much larger numbers than Selfish, Little are hard to find. And publishers who wanted to publish my last few works have them stuck in limbo while new distribution ideas and legal issues and fears are blown away.
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But the fundamental reason for taking the time to read is because books (good books, that is; books that matter) are the best aid to extended thought and imaginative reflection we have invented. In our own time, this is particularly important, as an antidote to the segmentation of thought encouraged by digital technologies. Cruising among the infinite quanta of data offered on the internet is fine for finding out information; but the disparate fragments we look at on our various screens rarely cohere into continuous thought, or a deepening of knowledge.
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When I go to buy a book, I always ask if it is right for me at this time, something I need right now. I think a lot of people go out and buy books because they love to read. They read it really fast and then move on to the next book. I don't do that.
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Students and scholars of all kinds and of every age aim, as a rule, only at information, not insight. They make it a point of honour to have information about everything, every stone, plant, battle, or experiment and about all books, collectively and individually. It never occurs to them that information is merely a means to insight, but in itself is of little or no value.
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May blessings be upon the head of Cadmus, the Phoenicians, or whoever it was that invented books.
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Basbanes makes you love books.
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The books weren't exactly Linnet's general reading fare, but a desperate woman will read anything.
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Books, like men their authors, have no more than one wayofcoming intothe world, but there areten thousand to go out of it, and return no more.
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Is there any excitement to compare with the opening of a fresh parcel of books?
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Books are but waste paper unless we spend in action the wisdom we get from thought.
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Some books are a revelation. They come along at just the right time for just the right reasons. They become heart books and soul books.
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What a blessing it is to love books. Everybody must love something, and I know of no objects of love that give such substantial and unfailing returns as books and a garden.
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If you aren't a reader and you have a kid with his face buried in books, it can be a bit threatening. My parents viewed my reading as somewhat effeminate, but also subversive on some level.
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Attention spans are changing. It's very noticeable. I am very aware that the kind of books I read in my childhood kids now won't be able to read. I was reading Kipling and PG Wodehouse and Shakespeare at the age of 11. The kind of description and detail I read I would not put in my books. I don't know how much you can fight that because you want children to read. So I pack in excitement and plot and illustrations and have a cliffhanger every chapter. Charles Dickens was doing cliffhangers way back when. But even with all the excitement you have to make children care about the characters.
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I think of an intellectual as just being bookish, being interested in history books, utopian ideas, that kind of thing.
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Write books only if you are going to say in them the things you would never dare confide to anyone.
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My books don't seem to belong to me after I have once written them; and I find myself delivering opinions about them as if I had nothing to do with them.
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Arthur Koestler wrote some other very interesting books, but that book - I mean, if I were teaching, I don't care what the course is, I would say you really have to read "Darkness at Noon".
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There weren't any curtains in the windows, and the books that didn't fit into the bookshelf lay piled on the floor like a bunch of intellectual refugees.
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I think readers are just looking for things that maybe they recognize or can relate to in the books.
