It is not so very important for a person to learn facts. For that he does not really need a college. He can learn them from books. The value of an education in a liberal arts college is not learning of many facts but the training of the mind to think something that cannot be learned from textbooks.
Anyone can repeat a technical explanation they read in a text-book or blog post.
There comes a point in your life when you need to stop reading other people’s books and write your own.
Fortunate Newton, happy childhood of science. Nature to him was an open book. He stands before us strong, certain, and alone.
Words can be like X-rays if you use them properly – they’ll go through anything. You read and you’re pierced.
The proper study of mankind is books.
Back to culture. Yes, actually to culture. You can’t consume much if you sit still and read books.
The snapshots had become almost as dim as memories.
Plasticene and self-expression will not solve the problems of education. Nor will technology and vocational guidance; nor the classics and the Hundred Best Books.
All our science is just a cookery book, with an orthodox theory of cooking that nobody’s allowed to question, and a list of recipes that mustn’t be added to except by special permission from the head cook.
In books, the proportion of exceptional to commonplace people is very high; in reality, very low.
All the characters in my books are imagined, but all have a bit of who I am in them – much like the characters in your dreams are all formed by who you are.
I heard a sigh, as though the books were breathing. I felt that this was where I belonged. This was where I lived.
Every time I finish a book, I forget everything I learned writing it – the information just disappears out of my head.
I never plot out my novels in terms of the tone of the book. Hopefully, once a story is begun it reveals itself.
Even in times when it’s difficult to figure out, how do you go forward, art – and books – always help.
He started to look at me in a manner I recognized: it was the way I looked at a new book, one I had never read before, one that surprised me with all it had to say.
I’ve been a screenwriter for twenty-five years. Every one of my books have been optioned for movies and I have written a few of those screenplays.
Deliver me from writers who say the way they live doesn’t matter. I’m not sure a bad person can write a good book, If art doesn’t make us better, then what on earth is it for.
Love likes to extend itself. If you receive it in a book – or however you get it – then your duty is to extend it beyond.