#books

What are American dry-goods? asked the duchess, raising her large hands in wonder and accentuating the verb. American novels, answered Lord Henry. ↗

— Oscar Wilde

#bad-reviews #books #humor #literary-criticism #novels

And what would happen if we never read the classics? There comes a point in life, it seems to me, where you have to decide whether you're a Person of Letters or merely someone who loves books, and I'm beginning to see that the book lovers have more fun. ↗

— Nick Hornby

#reading #life

I'd like to emphasize that when a reader finishes a great novel, he will immediately begin looking for another. If someone loves your book, it increases the chance that he or she will look at mine. So there is no competition between writers. Another writer's success helps build a larger readership for all of us. ↗

— David Farland

#critics #fantasy #writing #love

I know nothing in the world that has as much power as a word. Sometimes I write one, and I look at it, until it begins to shine. ↗

— Emily Dickinson

#literature #meaning #power #words #literature

The world is a hellish place, and bad writing is destroying the quality of our suffering. ↗

— Tom Waits

#literature #writing #literature

Stories are important...They can be more important than anything. If they carry the truth. ↗

— Patrick Ness

#stories #monsters

Yes, a great library — a library as magnificent as this one — was a dangerous arsenal, one that kings and emperors feared more than the greatest army or magazine. Not a single volume from the Spanish Rooms would survive, he swore, sniffling into his cup. No, no, not a single scrap would escape this holocaust! ↗

— Ross King

#holocaust

But the not-very-highbrow truth of the matter was that the reading was how I got my ya-yas out. For the sake of my bookish reputation I upgraded to Tolstoy and Steinbeck before I understood them, but my dark secret was that really, I preferred the junk. The Dragonriders of Pern, Flowers in the Attic, The Clan of the Cave Bear. This stuff was like my stash of Playboys under the mattress. ↗

— Julie Powell

#reading #ya

Do the children who prefer books set in the real, ordinary, workaday world ever read as obsessively as those who would much rather be transported into other worlds entirely? ↗

— Laura Miller

#children #escapism #fantasy #reading #reality

A long time ago, I opened a book, and this is what I found inside: a whole new world. It isn't the world I live in, although sometimes it looks a lot like it. Sometimes, though, it feels closest to my world when it doesn't look like it at all. That world is enormous, yet it all fits inside an everyday object. I don't have to keep everything I find there, but what I choose to take with me is more precious than anything I own, and there is always more where that came from. The world I found was inside a book, and then that world turned out to be made of even more books, each of which led to yet another world. It goes on forever and ever. At nine I thought I must get to Narnia or die. It would be a long time before I understood that I was already there. ↗

— Laura Miller

#narnia #skepticism