"If you tell the truth, you don't have to remember anything."
— Mark Twain

"A room without books is like a body without a soul."
— Marcus Tullius Cicero

"The man who does not read good books has no advantage over the man who can't read them."
— Mark Twain

"You don't have to burn books to destroy a culture. Just get people to stop reading them."
— Ray Bradbury

"I find television very educating. Every time somebody turns on the set, I go into the other room and read a book."
— Groucho Marx

"The worst thing about new books is that they keep us from reading the old ones."
— Joseph Joubert

"The failure to read good books both enfeebles the vision and strengthens our most fatal tendency - the belief that the here and now is all there is."
— Allan Bloom

"What makes lovemaking and reading resemble each other most is that within both of them times and spaces open, different from measurable time and space."
— Italo Calvino

"Writing always means hiding something in such a way that it is then discovered."
— Italo Calvino (1923 - 1985)

"In the shop window you have promptly identified the cover with the title you were looking for. Following this visual trail, you have forced your way through the shop past the thick barricade of Books You Haven't Read, which are frowning at you from the tables and shelves, trying to cow you...And thus you pass the outer girdle of ramparts, but then you are attacked by the infantry of Books That If You Had More Than One Life You Would Certainly Also Read But Unfortunately Your Days Are Numbered. With a rapid maneuver you bypass them and move into the phalanxes of the Books You Mean To Read But There Are Others You Must Read First, the Books Too Expensive Now And You'll Wait Till They're Remaindered, the Books ditto When They Come Out in Paperback, Books You Can Borrow From Somebody, Books That Everybody's Read So It's As If You Had Read Them, Too. "
— Italo Calvino (If On a Winter's Night a Traveler)

"...but it is also true, if this brings her any consolation, that if, before every action, we were to begin weighing up the consequences, thinking about them in earnest, first the immediate consequences, then the probably, then the possible, then the imaginable ones, we should never move beyond the point where our first thought brought us to a halt."
— José Saramago

"We construct a narrative for ourselves, and that's the thread that we follow from one day to the next. People who disintegrate as personalities are the ones who lose that thread.
"
— Paul Auster

"Each time he took a walk, he felt as though he were leaving himself behind, and by giving himself up to the movement of the streets, by reducing himself to a seeing eye, he was able to escape the obligation to think, and this, more than anything else, brought him a measure of peace, a salutary emptiness within...By wandering aimlessly, all places became equal and it no longer mattered where he was. On his best walks he was able to feel that he was nowhere. And this, finally was all he ever asked of things: to be nowhere. (City of Glass)
"
— Paul Auster (The New York Trilogy: City of Glass, Ghosts, The Locked Room)

"When fascism comes to America, it will be wrapped in the flag and carrying the cross."
— Sinclair Lewis

"Advertising is a valuable economic factor because it is the cheapest way of selling goods, particularly if the goods are worthless."
— Sinclair Lewis

"Winter is not a season, it's an occupation."
— Sinclair Lewis

"If you dedicate your attention to discipline in your life you become smarter while you are writing than while you are hanging out with your pals or in any other line of work."
— Russell Banks

"Reading is to the mind what exercise is to the body."
— Joseph Addison

"Despite the enormous quantity of books, how few people read! And if one reads profitably, one would realize how much stupid stuff the vulgar herd is content to swallow every day."
— Voltaire

"I have always imagined that Paradise will be some kind of library."
— Jorge Luis Borges

"Good friends, good books and a sleepy conscience: this is the ideal life."
— Mark Twain

"You have to write the book that wants to be written. And if the book will be too difficult for grown-ups, then you write it for children."
— Madeleine L'Engle

"The person, be it gentleman or lady, who has not pleasure in a good novel, must be intolerably stupid."
— Jane Austen (Northanger Abbey)

"And on the subject of burning books: I want to congratulate librarians, not famous for their physical strength or their powerful political connections or their great wealth, who, all over this country, have staunchly resisted anti-democratic bullies who have tried to remove certain books from their shelves, and have refused to reveal to thought police the names of persons who have checked out those titles.

So the America I loved still exists, if not in the White House or the Supreme Court or the Senate or the House of Representatives or the media. The America I love still exists at the front desks of our public libraries."
— Kurt Vonnegut (A Man Without a Country)