Homeliness is almost as great a merit in a book as in a house, if the reader would abide there. It is next to beauty, and a very high art.
At least let us have healthy books.
The book exists for us, perchance, which will explain our miracles and reveal new ones.
Many college text-books, which were a weariness and stumbling-block when I studied, I have since read a little with pleasure and profit.
A book should contain pure discoveries, glimpses of terra firma, though by shipwrecked mariners, and not the art of navigation by those who have never been out of sight of land.
After all, I believe it is the style of thought entirely, and the style of expression, which makes the difference in books.
There are three things that grow more precious with age; old wood to burn, old books to read, and old friends to enjoy.
A dollar put into a book and a book mastered might change the whole course of a boy’s life. It might easily be the beginning of the development of leadership that would carry the boy far in service to his fellow men.
I don’t like to read books. They muss up my mind.
A book lying idle on a shelf is wasted ammunition.
A book lying idle on a shelf is wasted ammunition. Like money, books must be kept in constant circulation. Lend and borrow to the maximum.
All my good reading, you might say, was done in the toilet. There are passages in Ulysses which can be read only in the toilet – if one wants to extract the full flavor of their content.
Forget the books you want to write. Think only of the book you are writing.
There is only one thing which interests me vitally now, and that is the recording of all that which is omitted in books.
And the books you write. They’re not you. They’re not me sitting here, this Henry Miller. They belong to someone else. It’s terrible. You can never rest.
My understanding of the meaning of a book is that the book itself disappears from sight, that it is chewed alive, digested and incorporated into the system as flesh and blood which in turn creates new spirit and reshapes the world.
Until it is kindled by a spirit as flamingly alive as the one which gave it birth a book is dead to us. Words divested of their magic are but dead hieroglyphs.
It is true, that it is not at all necessary to love many books, in order to love them much.
I love an author the more for having been himself a lover of books.
Many readers judge of the power of a book by the shock it gives their feelings – as some savage tribes determine the power of muskets by their recoil; that being considered best which fairly prostrates the purchaser.