Perhaps they were looking for passion; perhaps they delved into this book as into a mysterious parcel – a gift box at the bottom of which, hidden in layers of rustling tissue paper, lay something they’d always longed for but couldn’t ever grasp.
A reader can never tell if it’s a real thimble or an imaginary thimble, because by the time you’re reading it, they’re the same. It’s a thimble. It’s in the book.
Writers and books are cheap dates, especially when you compare the cost of a book with a ticket to the opera – or an NHL game.
Publishers are in business to make money, and if your books do well they don’t care if you are male, female, or an elephant.
Show me a character totally without anxieties and I will show you a boring book.
The society in ‘The Handmaid’s Tale’ is a throwback to the early Puritans whom I studied extensively at Harvard under Perry Miller, to whom the book is dedicated.
I have suffered for this book; now it’s your turn.
There are perhaps no days of our childhood we lived so fully as those we spent with a favorite book.
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.
Our passions shape our books, repose writes them in the intervals.
They like my books better in England than in France; a translation would be very successful there.
Beautiful books are always written in a sort of foreign language.
Each reader reads only what is already within himself. The book is only a sort of optical instrument which the writer offers to the reader to enable the latter to discover in himself what he would not have found but for the aid of the book.
All these books are published in Heaven.
I touch your book and dream of our odyssey in the supermarket and feel absurd.
My books piled up before me for my use waiting in space where I placed them, they haven’t disappeared, time’s left its remnants and qualities for me to use – my words piled up, my texts, my manuscripts, my loves.
I always thought the front line was the bookstores. And bookstores around America, around the world did astonishingly well. They held the line. They didn’t chicken out. You know, they defended the book. They kept it in the front of the store.
A book is not completed till it’s read.
The publishing of a book is a worldwide event. The attempt to suppress a book is a worldwide event.
Science fiction is always a vehicle for ideas. It’s the form which allows either movies or books to be an exploration of how we should live.