Books Quotes

If literature isn't everything, it's not worth a single hour of someone's trouble.

JeanPaul Sartre

The light that radiates from the great novels time can never dim, for human existence is perpetually being forgotten by man and thus the novelists discoveries, however old they may be, will never cease to astonish.

Milan Kundera

The party of God and the party of Literature have more in common than either will admit; their texts may conflict, but their bigotries coincide. Both insist on being the sole custodians of the true word and its only interpreters.

Frederic Raphael

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

In literature, as in love, we are astonished at the choice made by other people.

Andre Maurois

No one can write a best seller by trying to. He must write with complete sincerity; the clich?s that make you laugh, the hackneyed characters, the well-worn situations, the commonplace story that excites your derision, seem neither hackneyed, well worn nor commonplace to him. The conclusion is obvious: you cannot write anything that will convince unless you are yourself convinced. The best seller sells because he writes with his heart's blood.

W. Somerset Maugham

A book is never a masterpiece: it becomes one. Genius is the talent of a dead man.

Edmond de Goncourt

One of the proud joys of the man of letters --if that man of letters is an artist is to feel within himself the power to immortalize at will anything he chooses to immortalize. Insignificant though he may be, he is conscious of possessing a creative divinity. God creates lives; the man of imagination creates fictional lives which may make a profound and as it were more living impression on the world's memory.

Edmond de Goncourt

Books are the legacies that a great genius leaves to mankind, which are delivered down from generation to generation as presents to the posterity of those who are yet unborn.

Joseph Addison

One must own that there are certain books which can be read without the mind and without the heart, but still with considerable enjoyment.

Virginia Woolf

Books are immortal sons deifying their sires

Plato

Silent companions of the lonely hour,Friends, who can never alter or forsake,Who for inconstant roving have no power,And all neglect, perforce, must calmly take,--Let me return to you; this turmoil endingWhich worldly cares have in my spirit wrought,And, o'er your old familiar pages bending,Refresh my mind with many a tranquil thought:Till, haply meeting there, from time to time,Fancies, the audible echo of my own,'Twill be like hearing in a foreign climeMy native language spoke in friendly tone,And with a sort of welcome I shall dwellOn these, my unripe musings, told so well.

Caroline Norton, To My Books

Books are for people who wish they were somewhere else.

Mark Twain

Make it a rule never to give a child a book you would not read yourself.

George Bernard Shaw

It is only a novel... or, in short, only some work in which the greatest powers of the mind are displayed, in which the most thorough knowledge of human nature, the happiest delineation of its varieties, the liveliest effusions of wit and humour, are conveyed to the world in the best-chosen language

Jane Austen

It is my ambition to say in ten sentences what other men say in whole books what other men do not say in whole books

Friedrich Nietzsche

When we read of human beings behaving in certain ways, with the approval of the author, who gives his benediction to this behavior by his attitude towards the result of the behavior arranged by himself, we can be influenced towards behaving in the same way.

TS (Thomas Stearns) Eliot

So long as ignorance and misery remain on earth, books like this cannot be useless.

Victor Hugo

There is an incompatibility between literary creation and political activity.

Mario Vargas Llosa

Despair, feeding, as it always does, on phantasmagoria, is imperturbably leading literature to the rejection, en masse, of all divine and social laws, towards practical and theoretical evil.

Isidore Ducasse Lautreamont