Being poor is only romantic in books.
There is no book so bad, but something good may be found in it.
There is no beginning, no middle, no end, no suspense, no moral, no causes, no effects. What we love in our books are the depths of many marvelous moments seen all at one time.
One cannot judge by book being best seller. We all know that. Many best sellers are terrible trash.
If you only read the books that everyone else is reading, you can only think what everyone else is thinking.
Books are a uniquely portable magic.
“With The Thousand and One Nights”, I learned and never forgot that we should read only those books that force us to reread them.
Why can’t people just sit and read books and be nice to each other?
When I was a child, when I was an adolescent, books saved me from despair: that convinced me that culture was the highest of values.
What really knocks me out is a book that, when you’re all done reading it, you wish the author that wrote it was a terrific friend of yours and you could call him up on the phone whenever you felt like it. That doesn’t happen much, though.
We live for books. A sweet mission in this world dominated by disorder and decay.
We are of opinion that instead of letting books grow moldy behind an iron grating, far from the vulgar gaze, it is better to let them wear out by being read.