When I sit down to write a book, I do not say to myself, ‘I am going to produce a work of art.’ I write it because there is some lie that I want to expose, some fact to which I want to draw attention, and my initial concern is to get a hearing.
Money writes books, money sells them. Give me not righteousness, O Lord, give me money, only money.
The cheaper books become, the less money is spent on books.
Writing a book is a horrible, exhausting struggle, like a long bout of some painful illness.
In places this book is a little over-written, because Mr Blunden is no more able to resist a quotation than some people are to refuse a drink.
If I had to make a list of six books which were to be preserved when all others were destroyed, I would certainly put Gulliver’s Travels among them.
Until one has some kind of professional relationship with books, one does not discover how bad the majority of them are.
The Penguin books are splendid value for sixpence, so splendid that if other publishers had any sense they would combine against them and suppress them.
The existence of good bad literature – the fact that one can be amused or excited or even moved by a book that one’s intellect simply refuses to take seriously – is a reminder that art is not the same thing as cerebration.
Mrs Weaver nosed among the books, too dim-witted to grasp that they were in alphabetical order.
Prolonged, indiscriminate reviewing of books is a quite exceptionally thankless, irritating and exhausting job. It not only involves praising trash but constantly inventing reactions towards books about which one has no spontaneous feeling whatever.
I have written a book. This will come as quite a shock to some. They didn’t think I could read, much less write.
We’re supposed to have guns. It says so in the Bible; and the second greatest book ever written, the Texas State Constitution.
In this job, there are some simple pleasures that really help you cope. One is books, I mean, books are a great escape. Books are a way to get your mind on something else.
Most of you probably didn’t know that I have a new book out. Some guy put together a collection of my wit and wisdom – or, as he calls it, my accidental wit and wisdom. But I’m kind of proud that my words are already in book form.
Before history is written down in books, it is written in courage.
I don’t read books, but I have friends who do.
I have zero desire, just so you know, to be in the limelight. I don’t think it’s good for the country to have a former president criticize his successor. You’re not going to see me giving my opinions in the public arena, until I start selling my book. I’m going to emerge then submerge.
Bad seed is a robbery of the worst kind: for your pocket-book not only suffers by it, but your preparations are lost and a season passes away unimproved.
I conceive a knowledge of books is the basis upon which other knowledge is to be built.