Words worth keeping

Words can be like X-rays if you use them properly -- they’ll go through anything. You read and you’re pierced.

If you go home with somebody, and they don't have books, don't fuck 'em!

Read, read, read. Read everything -- trash, classics, good and bad, and see how they do it. Just like a carpenter who works as an apprentice and studies the master. Read! You'll absorb it.Then write. If it's good, you'll find out. If it's not, throw it out of the window.

Books are mirrors: you only see in them what you already have inside you.

You never have to change anything you got up in the middle of the night to write.

Good books don't give up all their secrets at once.

So please, oh please, we beg, we pray,Go throw your TV set away,And in its place you can installA lovely bookshelf on the wall.Then fill the shelves with lots of books.

I spent my life folded between the pages of books.In the absence of human relationships I formed bonds with paper characters. I lived love and loss through stories threaded in history; I experienced adolescence by association. My world is one interwoven web of words, stringing limb to limb, bone to sinew, thoughts and images all together. I am a being comprised of letters, a character created by sentences, a figment of imagination formed through fiction.

Books may well be the only true magic.

Reader's Bill of Rights1. The right to not read 2. The right to skip pages 3. The right to not finish 4. The right to reread 5. The right to read anything 6. The right to escapism 7. The right to read anywhere 8. The right to browse 9. The right to read out loud 10. The right to not defend your tastes

No tears in the writer, no tears in the reader. No surprise in the writer, no surprise in the reader.

Those who find ugly meanings in beautiful things are corrupt without being charming. This is a fault. Those who find beautiful meanings in beautiful things are the cultivated. For these there is hope. They are the elect to whom beautiful things mean only Beauty. There is no such thing as a moral or an immoral book. Books are well written, or badly written. That is all.

Don't ever tell anybody anything. If you do, you start missing everybody.

Many people, myself among them, feel better at the mere sight of a book.

There are worse crimes than burning books. One of them is not reading them.