I could have been a cult writer if I’d kept writing surrealistic novels. But I wanted to break into the mainstream, so I had to prove that I could write a realistic book.
I started writing at the kitchen table after midnight. It took ten months to finish that first book; I sent it to a publisher and I got some kind of prize, so it was like a dream – I was surprised to find it happening.
The others in the dorm thought I wanted to be a writer, because I was always alone with a book, but I had no such ambition. There was nothing I wanted to be.
Does G get angry because it follows F in the alphabet? Does page 68 in a book start a revolution because it follows 67?
Literature is my Utopia.
More than at any other time, when I hold a beloved book in my hand my limitations fall from me, my spirit is free.
True teaching cannot be learned from text-books any more than a surgeon can acquire his skill by reading about surgery.
I have depended on books not only for pleasure and for the wisdom they bring to all who read, but also for that knowledge which comes to others through their eyes and their ears.
I do not remember a time since I have been capable of loving books that I have not loved Shakespeare.
As we read spiritually about spiritual things, we open our hearts to God’s voice. Sometimes we must be willing to put down the book we are reading and just listen to what God is saying to us through our words.
Books can only reveal us to ourselves, and as often as they do us this service we lay them aside.
Books are to be distinguished by the grandeur of their topics even more than by the manner in which they are treated.
Books are the carriers of civilization. Without books, history is silent.
Writing your name can lead to writing sentences. And the next thing you’ll be doing is writing paragraphs, and then books. And then you’ll be in as much trouble as I am!
A broad margin of leisure is as beautiful in a man’s life as in a book. Haste makes waste, no less in life than in housekeeping. Keep the time, observe the hours of the universe, not of the cars.
It is not all books that are as dull as their readers.
A truly good book is something as natural, and as unexpectedly and unaccountably fair and perfect, as a wild-flower discovered on the prairies of the West or in the jungles of the East.
Books that are books are all that you want, and there are but a half dozen in any thousand.
A broad margin of leisure is as beautiful in a man’s life as in a book.
A truly good book is something as wildly natural and primitive, mysterious and marvelous, ambrosial and fertile as a fungus or a lichen.