Books are the treasured wealth of the world and the fit inheritance of generations and nations.

Books, the oldest and the best, stand naturally and rightfully on the shelves of every cottage... Their authors are a natural and irresistible aristocracy in every society, and, more than kings and emperors, exert an influence on mankind.

Why should we leave it to Harper & Brothers and Redding & Co. to select our reading?

Have you any right to read, especially novels, until you have exhausted the best part of the day in some employment that is called practical?

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

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.

Books succeed, And lives fail.

Beware that the one who reads is the same as the book, the same as what is read, the same as the speaker and the same as what is spoken without being the word.

I can't think of any one film that improved on a good novel, but I can think of many good films that came from very bad novels.

Everywhere I go, kids walk around not with books under their arms, but with radios up against their heads. Children can't read or write, but they can memorize whole albums.