And, after boasting this way of my tolerance, I come to the admission that it has a limit. Conduct may be founded on the hard rock or the wet marshes, but after a certain point I don’t care what it’s founded on. When I came back from the East last autumn I felt that I wanted the world to be in uniform and at a sort of moral attention forever; I wanted no more riotous excursions with privileged glimpses into the human heart. Only Gatsby, the man who gives his name to this book, was exempt from my reaction—Gatsby, who represented everything for which I have an unaffected scorn.
Sir Walter Elliot, of Kellynch-hall, in Somersetshire, was a man who, for his own amusement, never took up any book but the Barontage; there he found occupation for an idle hour, and consolation in a distressed one; . . .
How much we forgive to those who yield us the rare spectacle of heroic manners! We will pardon them the want of books, or arts, and even of gentler virtues. How tenaciously we remember them!
I think the key anecdote in the book is when Colin [Powell] and I were discussing Iraq. Colin was upstairs in the Treaty Room, in the residence. And he talks about his concerns about the use of military in Iraq. And I said I felt the same concerns, but it might be that we have to use it. In which case, he said, "I support you."
The three practical rules, then, which I have to offer, are, --/ Never read a book that is not a year old./ Never read any but the famed books./ Never read any but what you like.
Neither is a dictionary a bad book to read. There is no can't in it, no excess of explanation, and it is full of suggestion, the raw material of possible poems and histories.
Books are not absolutely dead things, but do contain a potency of life in them....I know they are as lively and as vigorously productive as those fabulous dragon's teeth and being sown up and down, may chance to spring up armed men.
So I went in front of the judge, and I had my St. Jude prayer book in my pocket and my St. Jude medal. And I'm standing there and that judge said I was found guilty, so he sentenced me to what the law prescribed: one to 14 years.
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.
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.