If you cannot read all your books, at any rate handle them, and, as it were, fondle them. Let them fall open where they will. Make a voyage of discovery, taking soundings of uncharted seas.

If you cannot read all your books...fondle them---peer into them, let them fall open where they will, read from the first sentence that arrests the eye, set them back on the shelves with your own hands, arrange them on your own plan so that you at least know where they are. Let them be your friends; let them, at any rate, be your acquaintances.

Already by 1900 I could boast I had written as many books as Moses.

I accumulated in those years so fine a surplus in the Book of Observance that I have been drawing confidently upon it ever since.

I was born under the Blue Ridge, and under that side which is blue in the evening light, in a wild land of game and forest and rushing waters.

There is a good saying to the effect that when a new book appears one should read an old one. As as author I would not recommend too strict an adherence to this saying.

Preposition: An enormously versatile part of grammar, as in 'What made you pick this book I didn't want to be read to out of up for?'

Writing a book is an adventure.