At last she shut the book sharply, lay back, and drew a deep breath, expressive of the wonder which always marks the transition from the imaginary world to the real world.
Up until then, whenever anyone had mentioned the possibility of making a film adaptation, my answer had always been, ‘No, I’m not interested.’ I believe that each reader creates his own film inside his head, gives faces to the characters, constructs every scene, hears the voices, smells the smells. And that is why, whenever a reader goes to see a film based on a novel that he likes, he leaves feeling disappointed, saying: ‘the book is so much better than the film.
To understand oneself requires patience, tolerant awareness; the self is a book of many volumes which you cannot read in a day, but when once you begin to read, you must read every word, every sentence, every paragraph for in them are the intimations of the whole. The beginning of it is the ending of it. If you know how to read, supreme wisdom is to be found.
I write for no other purpose than to add to the beauty that now belongs to me. I write a book for no other reason than to add three or four hundred acres to my magnificent estate.
A book should long for pen, ink, and writing-table: but usually it is pen, ink, and writing-table that long for a book. That is why books are so negligible nowadays.
A pioneer in this genre [ writing about the refugee crisis] : the book A Seventh Man, by the great John Berger, decades ago evoked the lives of migrant workers in Europe.
Knowledge exists in two forms - lifeless, stored in books, and alive, in the consciousness of men. The second form of existence is after all the essential one; the first, indispensable as it may be, occupies only an inferior position.
I've written a book that hopefully will give people a sense of what [presidency] was like. I hope my friends read it and say, "Now I understand." I hope my detractors read it and say, "Well, I better understand."
They recite their sacred books, although the fact informs me that these are a fiction from first to last. O Reason, thou (alone) speakest the truth. Then perish the fools who forged the (religious) traditions or interpreted them!
During the whole of a dull, dark, and soundless day in the autumn of the year, when the clouds hung oppressively low in the heavens, I had been passing alone, on horseback, through a singularly dreary tract of country; and at length found myself, as the shades of the evening drew on, within view of the melancholy House of Usher. I know not how it was - but, with the first glimpse of the building, a sense of insufferable gloom pervaded my spirit.