"I don't think of literature as an end in itself. It's just a way of communicating something."
—Isabel Allende
"All readers come to fiction as willing accomplices to your lies. Such is the basic goodwill contract made the moment we pick up a work of fiction."
—Steve Almond
"A real book is not one that's read, but one that reads us."
—W.H. Auden
"When I graduated from high school I couldn't go to college, so I went to the library 3 days a week for 10 years."
—Ray Bradbury
"In five minutes the earth would be a desert, and you cling to books."
—Elias Canetti
"The character that lasts is an ordinary guy with some extraordinary qualities."
—Raymond Chandler
"Literature is a luxury; fiction is a necessity."
—G.K. Chesterton
"I don't care if a reader hates one of my stories, just as long as he finishes the book."
—Roald Dahl
"The dearest ones of time, the strongest friends of the soul—BOOKS."
—Emily Dickinson
"Let us answer a book of ink with a book of flesh and blood."
—Ralph Waldo Emerson
"A novel is an impression, not an argument; and there the matter must rest."
—Thomas Hardy
"Easy reading is damn hard writing."
—Nathaniel Hawthorne
"All good books are alike in that they are truer than if they had really happened."
—Ernest Hemingway
"Books worth reading are worth re-reading."
—Holbrook Jackson
"If the book is true, it will find an audience that is meant to read it."
—Wally Lamb
"A mind needs books as a sword needs a whetstone, if it is to keep its edge."
—George R. R. Martin
"A literary creation can appeal to us in all sorts of ways—by its theme, subject, situations, characters. But above all it appeals to us by the presence in it of art. It is the presence of art in Crime and Punishment that moves us deeply rather than the story of Raskolnikov's crime."
—Boris Pasternak
"Stories of imagination tend to upset those without one."
—Terry Pratchett
"Everybody else is working to change, persuade, tempt and control them. The best readers come to fiction to be free of all that noise."
—Philip Roth
"One sure window into a person's soul is his reading list."
—Mary B. W. Tabor
"Books are the treasured wealth of the world and the fit inheritance of generations and nations."
—Henry David Thoreau
"If one cannot enjoy reading a book over and over again, there is no use in reading it at all."
—Oscar Wilde
"The books that the world calls immoral are the books that show the world its own shame."
—Oscar Wilde
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QUOTATIONS
PoetryA quotation is the repetition of one expression as part of another one, particularly when the quoted expression is well-known or explicitly attributed by citation to its original source, and it is indicated by (punctuated with) quotation marks.
