In the case of good books, the point is not to see how many of them you can get through, but rather how many can get through to you.
A lexicographer, a writer of dictionaries, a harmless drudge.
All good books are alike in that they are truer than if they really happened and after you are finished reading one you feel that it all happened to you and after which it all belongs to you.
All the glory of the world would be buried in oblivion, unless God had provided mortals with the remedy of books.
Books are the most mannerly of companions, accessible at all times, in all moods, frankly declaring the author's mind, without offense.
Everyone who knows how to read has it in their power to magnify themselves, to multiply the ways in which they exist, to make their life full, significant, and interesting.
Having your book turned into a movie is like seeing your oxen turned into bouillon cubes.
He has only half learned the art of reading who has not added to it the even more refined accomplishments of skipping and skimming.
If a book is worth reading at all, it is worth reading more than once. Suspense is the lowest of excitants, designed to take your breath away when the brain and heart crave to linger in nobler enjoyment. Suspense drags you on; appreciation causes you to linger.
If you would not be forgotten as soon as you are dead, either write things worth reading or do things worth writing.
Neither is a dictionary a bad book to read. There is no cant in it, no excess of explanation, and it is full of suggestions, the raw material of possible poems and histories.
Nothing links man to man like the frequent passage from hand to hand of a good book.
Some books are undeservedly forgotten; none are undeservedly remembered.
The delight of opening a new pursuit, or a new course of reading, imparts the vivacity and novelty of youth even to old age.
The dust and silence of the upper shelf.
The fact of knowing how to read is nothing, the whole point is knowing what to read.
The habit of reading is the only enjoyment in which there is no alloy; it lasts when all other pleasures fade.
The possession of a book becomes a substitute for reading it.
The responsibility of a dictionary is to record a language, not set its style.
To finish is both a relief and a release from an extraordinarily pleasant prison.
