Do not suppose, however, that I intend to urge a diet of classics on anybody. I have seen such diets at work. I have known people who have actually read all, or almost all, the guaranteed Hundred Best Books. God save us from reading nothing but the best.

You would not serve junk food at a banquet, and your book must be a banquet. Get your language from Swift , not from Shopsy's.

The ideal companion in bed is a good book.

I came at last to a recognition of myself as, in part, a Tom Sawyer who wanted everything done according to the rules of romantic fiction, and complicated simple solutions with his absurd adolescent, book-born nonsense.

The clerisy are those who read for pleasure, but not for idleness; who read for pastime but not to kill time; who love books, but do not live by books

If I had my way books would not be written in English, but in an exceedingly difficult secret language that only skilled professional readers and story-tellers could interpret. Then people would have to go to public halls and pay good prices to hear. . .

Too much traffic with a quotation book begets a conviction of ignorance in a sensitive reader. Not only is there a mass of quotable stuff he never quotes, but an even vaster realm of which he has never heard.