A bad book is as much of a labor to write as a good one, it comes as sincerely from the author’s soul.
Aldous Huxley
A book has got smell. A new book smells great. An old book smells even better. An old book smells like ancient Egypt.
Ray Bradbury
A book is a book is a book.
Maurice Sendak
A book is a fragile creature, it suffers the wear of time, it fears rodents, the elements and clumsy hands. So the librarian protects the books not only against mankind but also against nature and devotes his life to this war with the forces of oblivion.
Umberto Eco
A book is a garden, an orchard, a storehouse, a party, a company by the way, a counselor, a multitude of counselors.
Charles Baudelaire
A book is a gift you can open again and again.
Garrison Keillor
A book is a version of the world. If you do not like it, ignore it or offer your own version in return.
Salman Rushdie
A book is the only place in which you can examine a fragile thought without breaking it.
Edward P. Morgan
A book must be the ax for the frozen sea within us.
Franz Kafka
A book that is shut is but a block.
Thomas Fuller
A classic is a book that doesn’t have to be written again.
W. E. B. Du Bois
A good book has no ending.
R. D. Cumming
A good book is enjoyable. A great book sets off a bomb inside of you.
Ned Hepburn
A good novel tells us the truth about its hero; but a bad novel tells us the truth about its author.
G. K. Chesterton
A great book should leave you with many experiences, and slightly exhausted at the end. You live several lives while reading.
William Styron
A man may as well expect to grow stronger by always eating as wiser by always reading.
Jeremy Collier
A real book is not one that we read, but one that reads us.
W. H. Auden
A room without books is like a body without a soul.
Cicero
A wonderful thing about a book, in contrast to a computer screen, is that you can take it to bed with you.
Daniel J. Boorstin
All good books are alike in that they are truer than if they had really happened and after you are finished reading one you will feel that all that happened to you and afterwards it all belongs to you: the good and the bad, the ecstasy, the remorse and sorrow, the people and the places and how the weather was.
Ernest Hemingway
Always read something that will make you look good if you die in the middle of it.
P. J. O’Rourke
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.
Maya Angelou
Anyone who says they have only one life to live must not know how to read a book.
Unknown Author
Are we not like two volumes of one book?
Marceline Desbordes-Valmore
Be careful about reading health books. You may die of a misprint.
Mark Twain
Beware of the person of one book.
Thomas Aquinas
Books are good enough in their own way, but they are a mighty bloodless substitute for life.
Robert Louis Stevenson
Books are like mirrors: if a fool looks in, you cannot expect a genius to look out.
J. K. Rowling
Books are the quietest and most constant of friends; they are the most accessible and wisest of counsellors, and the most patient of teachers.
Charles W. Eliot
Books serve to show a man that those original thoughts of his aren’t very new after all.
Abraham Lincoln
Books support us in our solitude and keep us from being a burden to ourselves.
Jeremy Collier
Don’t join the book burners. Do not think you are going to conceal thoughts by concealing evidence that they ever existed.
Dwight D. Eisenhower
Every book is a children’s book if the kid can read!
Mitch Hedberg
Every burned book enlightens the world.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
Every reader finds himself. The writer’s work is merely a kind of optical instrument that makes it possible for the reader to discern what, without this book, he would perhaps never have seen in himself.
Marcel Proust
Finishing a book is just like you took a child out in the back yard and shot it.
Truman Capote
Finishing a good book is like leaving a good friend.
William Feather
Hungry man, reach for the book: it is a weapon.
Bertolt Brecht
I can’t imagine a man really enjoying a book and reading it only once.
C. S. Lewis
I divide all readers into two classes; those who read to remember and those who read to forget.
William Lyon Phelps
I think of life as a good book. The further you get into it, the more it begins to make sense.
Harold Kushner
I would never read a book if it were possible for me to talk half an hour with the man who wrote it.
Woodrow Wilson
If one cannot enjoy reading a book over and over again, there is no use in reading it at all.
Oscar Wilde
If there is a book that you want to read, but it hasn’t been written yet, you must be the one to write it.
Toni Morrison
If we encounter a man of rare intellect, we should ask him what books he reads.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
If you only read the books that everyone else is reading, you can only think what everyone else is thinking.
Haruki Murakami
I’m writing a book. I’ve got the page numbers done.
Steven Wright
In a good book the best is between the lines.
Swedish Proverb
In old days books were written by men of letters and read by the public. Nowadays books are written by the public and read by nobody.
Oscar Wilde
It is a good rule after reading a new book, never to allow yourself another new one till you have read an old one in between.
C. S. Lewis
It took me 40 years to write my first book.
Paulo Coelho
It’s not just the books under fire now that worry me. It is the books that will never be written. The books that will never be read. And all due to the fear of censorship. As always, young readers will be the real losers.
Judy Blume
Keep reading books, but remember that a book is only a book, and you should learn to think for yourself.
Maxim Gorky
Make it a rule never to give a child a book you would not read yourself.
George Bernard Shaw
Many books require no thought from those who read them, and for a very simple reason; they made no such demand upon those who wrote them.
Charles Caleb Colton
Marriage is a book of which the first chapter is written in poetry and the remaining chapters in prose.
Beverley Nichols
Men do not understand books until they have a certain amount of life, or at any rate no man understands a deep book, until he has seen and lived at least part of its contents.
Ezra Pound
Miss a meal if you have to, but don’t miss a book.
Jim Rohn
Most new books are forgotten within a year, especially by those who borrow them.
Evan Esar
Never loan a book to someone if you expect to get it back. Loaning books is the same as giving them away.
Douglas Coupland
Never read a book through merely because you have begun it.
John Witherspoon
No book is really worth reading at the age of ten which is not equally – and often far more – worth reading at the age of fifty and beyond.
C. S. Lewis
No man understands a deep book until he has seen and lived at least part of its contents.
Ezra Pound
No two persons ever read the same book.
Edmund Wilson
Nothing can do what a book can do. Lifts you out of your life… to a whole new world, whole new perspective. A book is like a dream you’re borrowing from a friend.
Dave Kellett
One always has a better book in one’s mind than one can manage to get onto paper.
Michael Cunningham
Outside of a dog, a book is man’s best friend. Inside of a dog it’s too dark to read.
Groucho Marx
Read the best books first, or you may not have a chance to read them at all.
Henry David Thoreau
Reading well is one of the great pleasures that solitude can afford you.
Harold Bloom
Rereading, we find a new book.
Mason Cooley
Some books are undeservedly forgotten; none are undeservedly remembered.
W. H. Auden
That is a good book which is opened with expectation and closed with profit.
Amos Bronson Alcott
The books that the world calls immoral are books that show the world its own shame.
Oscar Wilde
The most technologically efficient machine that man has ever invented is the book.
Northrop Frye
The profession of book writing makes horse racing seem like a solid, stable business.
John Steinbeck
The things I want to know are in books; my best friend is the man who’ll get me a book I ain’t read.
Abraham Lincoln
The worst thing about new books is that they keep us from reading the old ones.
Joseph Joubert
There are perhaps no days of our childhood we lived so fully as those we spent with a favorite book.
Marcel Proust
There are worse crimes than burning books. One of them is not reading them.
Joseph Brodsky
There comes a time when you have to choose between turning the page and closing the book.
Josh Jameson
There is a difference between a book of two hundred pages from the very beginning, and a book of two hundred pages which is the result of an original eight hundred pages. The six hundred are there. Only you don’t see them.
Elie Wiesel
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.
Gilbert K. Chesterton
There is no friend as loyal as a book.
Ernest Hemingway
There is no mistaking a real book when one meets it. It is like falling in love.
Christopher Morley
This paperback is very interesting, but I find it will never replace a hardcover book – it makes a very poor doorstop.
Alfred Hitchcock
Wear the old coat and buy the new book.
Austin Phelps
What you don’t know would make a great book.
Sydney Smith
Whenever you read a good book, somewhere in the world a door opens to allow in more light.
Vera Nazarian
Where is human nature so weak as in the bookstore?
Henry Ward Beecher
Writing a book of poetry is like dropping a rose petal down the Grand Canyon and waiting for the echo.
Don Marquis
You cannot open a book without learning something.
Confucius
You know you’ve read a good book when you turn the last page and feel a little as if you have lost a friend.
