Some books are to be tasted, others to be swallowed, and some few to be chewed and digested: that is, some books are to be read only in parts, others to be read, but not curiously, and some few to be read wholly, and with diligence and attention.
Sir Francis Bacon on Books
Bildungsroman as a highly self reflective novel, one in which the problem of the bildung, of personal growth, is enacted in the narrator’s discursive self-understanding rather than in the events which the hero experiences
Marin Swales on Bildungsroman
It is with the reading of books the same as with looking at pictures; one must, without doubt, without hesitations, with assurance, admire what is beautiful.
Van Gogh on Books
The difficulty of literature is not to write, but to write what you mean; not to affect your reader, but to affect him precisely as you wish.
Difficulty of Literature
Books are good enough in their own way but they are a mighty bloodless substitute for life.
Robert Louis Stevenson on Books
Each book, intuitively sensed and, in the case of fiction, intuitively worked out, stands on what has gone before, and grows out of it.
Naipaul about book
What makes books – and with them writers – so dangerous that church and state, politburos and the mass media feel the need to oppose them?
Power of Books
Put simply the novel stands between us and the hardening concept of statistical man. There is no other medium in which we can live for so long and so intimately with a character. That is the service a novel renders.
William Golding on the Novel
There is no such thing as a moral or an immoral book. Books are well written, or badly written.
Oscar Wilde on Books
The reader plays a text as one plays a game: s/he voluntarily accepts the rules of the text in order to participate in the practice that those rules make possible and pleasurable; the practice is, of course, the production of meanings and identities. In a text, as in a game, the rules are there to construct a space within which freedom and control of self are possible. Games and texts construct ordered worlds within which the players/readers can experience the pleasures of both freedom and control: in particular, for our purposes, playing the text involves the freedom of making and controlling meanings.
Pleasure and Play
A book is the only place in which you can examine a fragile thought without breaking it, or explore an explosive idea without fear it will go off in your face. It is one of the few havens remaining where a man’s mind can get both provocation and privacy.
A book is
In books lies the soul of the whole Past Time: the articulate audible voice of the Past, when the body and material substance of it has altogether vanished like a dream.
In books lies the soul of the whole Past Time
A house without books is like a room without windows.
