The last thing that we discover in writing a book, is to know what to put at the beginning.
—Blaise Pascal (1623–62) French Mathematician, Physicist, Theologian
He that loves not books before he comes to thirty years of age, will hardly love them enough afterward to understand them.
—Edward Hyde, 1st Earl of Clarendon (1609–74) English Statesman, Historian
Literature transforms and intensifies ordinary language, deviates systematically from everyday speech. If you approach me at a bus stop and murmur “Thou still unravished bride of quietness,” then I am instantly aware that I am in the presence of the literary.
—Terry Eagleton
The first time I read an excellent work, it is to me just as if I had gained a new friend; and when I read over a book I have perused before, it resembles the meeting with an old one.
—Oliver Goldsmith (1730–74) Irish Novelist, Playwright, Poet
It is not the first duty of the novelist to provide blueprints for insurrection, or uplifting tales of successful resistance for the benefit of the opposition. The naming of what is there is what is important.
—Ian McEwan British Novelist, Short-Story Writer
Great literature cannot grow from a neglected or impoverished soil. Only if we actually tend or care will it transpire that every hundred years or so we might get a Middlemarch.
—P. D. James (b.1920) British Novelist
What is reading, but silent conversation.
—Walter Savage Landor (1775–1864) English Writer, Poet
Henry James seems most entirely in his element, doing that is to say what everything favors his doing, when it is a question of recollection. The mellow light which swims over the past, the beauty which suffuses even the commonest little figures of that
—Virginia Woolf (1882–1941) English Novelist
Make it a rule never to give a child a book you would not read yourself.
—George Bernard Shaw (1856–1950) Irish Playwright
The struggle of literature is in fact a struggle to escape from the confines of language; it stretches out from the utmost limits of what can be said; what stirs literature is the call and attraction of what is not in the dictionary.
—Italo Calvino (1923–85) Italian Novelist, Essayist, Journalist
Begin to read a book that will help you move toward your dream.
—Les Brown
To learn to read is to light a fire; every syllable that is spelled out is a spark.
—Victor Hugo (1802–85) French Novelist
Literature is my Utopia. Here I am not disenfranchised. No barrier of the senses shuts me out from the sweet, gracious discourses of my book friends. They talk to me without embarrassment or awkwardness.
—Helen Keller (1880–1968) American Author
No book can be so good as to be profitable when negligently read.
—Seneca the Younger (Lucius Annaeus Seneca) (c.4 BCE–65 CE) Roman Stoic Philosopher, Statesman, Tragedian
Morality is the herd-instinct in the individual.
—Friedrich Nietzsche (1844–1900) German Philosopher, Scholar, Writer
You should read books like you take medicine, by advice, and not by advertisement.
—John Ruskin (1819–1900) English Writer, Art Critic
The mortality of all inanimate things is terrible to me, but that of books most of all.
—William Dean Howells (1837–1920) American Novelist, Critic
A good essay must have this permanent quality about it; it must draw its curtain round us, but it must be a curtain that shuts us in not out.
—Virginia Woolf (1882–1941) English Novelist
Books are the money of Literature, but only the counters of Science.
—Thomas Henry Huxley (1825–95) English Biologist
A book is like a man—clever and dull, brave and cowardly, beautiful and ugly. For every flowering thought there will be a page like a wet and mangy mongrel, and for every looping flight a tap on the wing and a reminder that wax cannot hold the feathers firm too near the sun.
—John Steinbeck (1902–68) American Novelist, Short Story Writer, Journalist
Books are immortal sons deifying their sires.
—Plato (428 BCE–347 BCE) Ancient Greek Philosopher, Mathematician, Educator
A book worth reading is worth buying.
—John Ruskin (1819–1900) English Writer, Art Critic
The greatest masterpiece in literature is only a dictionary out of order.
—Jean Cocteau (1889–1963) French Poet, Playwright, Film Director
Few are sufficiently sensible of the importance of that economy in reading which selects, almost exclusively, the very first order of books. Why, except for some special reason, read an inferior book, at the very time you might be reading one of the highest order?
—John W. Foster
A book is a version of the world. If you do not like it, ignore it; or offer your own version in return.
—Salman Rushdie (b.1947) Indian-born British Novelist
Autobiography is probably the most respectable form of lying.
—Humphrey Carpenter (1946–2005) English Children’s Books Writer, Biographer, Broadcaster
No one is fit to judge a book until he has rounded Cape Horn in a sailing vessel, until he has bumped into two or three icebergs, until he has been lost in the sands of the desert, until he has spent a few years in the House of the Dead.
—Van Wyck Brooks (1886–1963) American Literary Critic, Biographer, Historian
I would sooner read a timetable or a catalog than nothing at all. They are much more entertaining than half the novels that are written.
—W. Somerset Maugham (1874–1965) British Novelist, Short-Story Writer, Playwright
To read well, that is, to read true books in a true spirit, is a noble exercise, and one that will task the reader more than any other exercise which the customs of the day esteem. It requires a training such as the athletes underwent, the steady intention almost of the whole life to this object.
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–62) American Philosopher
A book is a part of life, a manifestation of life, just as much as a tree or a horse or a star. It obeys its own rhythms, its own laws, whether it be a novel, a play, or a diary. The deep, hidden rhythm of life is always there, that of the pulse, the heart beat.
—Henry Miller (1891–1980) American Novelist