To achieve lasting literature, fictional or factual, a writer needs perceptive vision, absorptive capacity, and creative strength.
Write to be understood, speak to be heard, read to grow.
Writing is a solitary occupation. Family, friends, and society are natural enemies of the writer. He must be alone, uninterrupted and slightly savage if he is to sustain and complete an undertaking.
We are the children of a technological age. We have found streamlined ways of doing much of our routine work. Printing is no longer the only way of reproducing books. Reading them, however, has not changed.
Books themselves need no defense. Their spokesmen come and go, their readers live and die, they remain constant.
We all think were going to be great and we feel a little bit robbed when our expectation aren’t met, but sometimes our expectations sell us short. Sometimes the expected simply pales in comparison to the Write to be understood, speak to be heard, read to grow.
What makes a book great, a so-called classic, it its quality of always being modern, of its author, though he be long dead, continuing to speak to each new generation.
Books are islands in the ocean of time. They are also oases in the deserts of time.
I have always been reconciled to the fact that I was born a bibliomaniac, never have I sought a cure, and my dearest friends have been drawn from those likewise suffering from book madness.
Unless their use by readers bring them to life, books are indeed dead things.
This is the gift all writers seek-to write language that incandesces yet does not melt.
The good writer, the great writer, has what I have called the three S’s: the power to see, to sense, and to say. That is, he is perceptive, he is feeling, and he has the power to express in language what he observes and reacts to.
Books, books, books in all their aspects, in form and spirit, their physical selves and what reading releases from their hieroglyphic pages, in their sight and smell, in their touch and feel to the questing hand, and in the intellectual music which they sing to the thoughtful brain and loving heart, books are to me the best of all symbols, the realest of all reality.
A book is one of the most patient of all man’s inventions. Centuries mean nothing to a well-made book. It awaits its destined reader, come when he may, with eager hand and seeing eye. Then occurs one of the great examples of union, that of a man with a book, pleasurable, sometimes fruitful, potentially world-changing, simple; and in a public library... without cost to the reader.