7,712 Quotes About Books

All I wanted was a job like a book so good I'd be finishing it for the rest of my life.

Books, after all, are extraordinary things: thoughts made visible, paper and ink sculptures of the mind, time and space made into words. There's no end to judging so many books. But a literary editor's work is never what Ecclesiastes calls a weariness of the flesh. Rather, it's an animation of the spirit.

Words on a page are incomplete. The poem, the novel or the non-fiction pamphlet are finished when they are taken up and engaged with. Connection is collaborative. For words to have meaning, they have to be read.

Compulsive reading is a foolish and harmful abuse of an otherwise good thing, truly a great evil, as contagious as the yellow fever in Philadelphia.

The purpose of books is not to be read. I buy books not to read them. I own a lot of books. I write books, I collect books, I think about books, I copy books, I pay for books – I’m in the book business. But I don’t read books.

Read more slowly and more deeply; the number of books you finish in a year is meaningless. Read what speaks to your heart and let no one tell you what that is; only you know. Reading isn’t a chore or a duty. It’s holy. It makes pain bearable and it provides company in the dark.

When we read a book, though, we call it ours, don't we, and I have always said that's because readers make a book their own through reading it. They do half the work, with their own imaginations, fleshing things out, painting each character and place and event in more detail than we have actually set out on paper, and we writers merely set the readers on their way.

I seemed to really like people who really liked books. I wondered what that said about me.

As for reading books, even far-out books, even beatnik books, fine. Only there are not enough books for me down South, which is one reason I came to New York.