#book

To literary critics a book is assumed to be guilty until it proves itself innocent. ↗

— Nelson Algren

#criticism #critics #literature #writing #literary-criticism

There must always be a fringe of the experimental in literature--poems bizarre in form and curious in content, stories that overreach for what has not hitherto been put in story form, criticism that mingles a search for new truth with bravado. We should neither scoff at this trial margin nor take it too seriously. Without it, literature becomes inert and complacent. But the everyday person's reading is not, ought not to be, in the margin. He asks for a less experimental diet, and his choice is sound. If authors and publishers would give him more heed they would do wisely. They are afraid of the swarming populace who clamor for vulgar sensation (and will pay only what it is worth), and they are afraid of petulant literati who insist upon sophisticated sensation (and desire complimentary copies). The stout middle class, as in politics and industry, has far less influence than its good sense and its good taste and its ready purse deserve. ↗

— Henry Seidel Canby

#literature #middle-class #middlebrows #diet

If you cannot read all your books...fondle them---peer into them, let them fall open where they will, read from the first sentence that arrests the eye, set them back on the shelves with your own hands, arrange them on your own plan so that you at least know where they are. Let them be your friends; let them, at any rate, be your acquaintances. ↗

— Winston Churchill

#first-sentence

Ce n'était qu'un renard semblable à cent mille autres. Mais j'en ai fait mon ami, et il est maintenant unique au monde. ↗

— Antoine de Saint-Exupéry

#children-s-books #foreign-language #french #friendship #friendship

When someone gives me either a democratic or republican pamphlet, I throw it in their face. I’m a librarian, damn it! We only take book donations. ↗

— Bauvard

#funny #humor #politics #funny

Yes, when I get big and have my own home, no plush chairs and lace curtains for me. And no rubber plants. I'll have a desk like this in my parlor and white walls and a clean green blotter every Saturday night and a row of shining yellow pencils always sharpened for writing and a golden-brown bowl with a flower or some leaves or berries always in it and books . . . books . . . books. . . . ↗

— Betty Smith

#reading #flowers

Second hand books are wild books, homeless books; they have come together in vast flocks of variegated feather, and have a charm which the domesticated volumes of the library lack. ↗

— Virginia Woolf

#library #wild

There is no such thing as a moral or an immoral book. Books are well written, or badly written. That is all. ↗

— Oscar Wilde

#dramatist #morality #novelist #poet #wild

Thank you for sending me a copy of your book. I'll waste no time reading it. ↗

— Moses Hadas

#books #classic-insult #irony #literary-criticism #time

Me, poor man, my library Was dukedom large enough. ↗

— William Shakespeare

#poor