How to write

A real book is not one that we read, but one that reads us. - W. H. Auden

You see, the interesting thing about books, as opposed, say, to films, is that it’s always just one person encountering the book, it’s not an audience, it’s one to one. - Paul Auster

The book is your book. You have been responsible for every single thing on every page, every comma, every syllable is your work. - Paul Auster

Some books leave us free and some books make us free. - Ralph Waldo Emerson

To feel most beautifully alive means to be reading something beautiful, ready always to apprehend in the flow of language the sudden flash of poetry. - Gaston Bachelard

Some books are to be tasted; others to be swallowed; and some few to be chewed and digested. - Francis Bacon

There was a time when the world acted on books; now books act on the world. - Joseph Joubert

A book is a mirror: If an ass peers into it, you can’t expect an apostle to look out. - Georg C. Lichtenberg

Do we write books so that they shall merely be read? Don’t we also write them for employment in the household? For one that is read from start to finish, thousands are leafed through, other thousands lie motionless, others are jammed against mouseholes, thrown at rats, others are stood on, sat on, drummed on, have gingerbread baked on them or are used to light pipes. - Georg C. Lichtenberg

The things I want to know are in books; my best friend is the man who’ll get me a book I ain’t read. - Abraham Lincoln

Many readers judge of the power of a book by the shock it gives their feelings –as some savage tribes determine the power of muskets by their recoil; that being considered best which fairly prostrates the purchaser. - Henry Wadsworth Longfellow

I feel a kind of reverence for the first books of young authors. There is so much aspiration in them, so much audacious hope and trembling fear, so much of the heart’s history, that all errors and shortcomings are for a while lost sight of in the amiable self assertion of youth. - Henry Wadsworth Longfellow

Books are the bees which carry the quickening pollen from one to another mind. - James Russell Lowell