"The courage of the poet is to keep ajar the door that leads into madness."
- Christopher Morley
"Suppose someone tried to write your biography. What nonsense! How much would he know? Would he know what you thought when you looked in the subway slot-machine? How brutally you spoke when you were an..."
"There is only one success-to be able to spend life in your own way."
"There is no mistaking a real book when one meets it. It is like falling in love."
"When you sell a man a book you don't sell just twelve ounces of paper and ink and glue - you sell him a whole new life. Love and friendship and humour and ships at sea by night - there's all heaven an..."
"That's what this country needs -- more books!"
"The real purpose of books is to trap the mind into doing its own thinking. "
"Printer's ink has been running a race against gunpowder these many, many years. Ink is handicapped, in a way, because you can blow up a man with gunpowder in half a second, while it may take twenty ye..."
"The world has been printing books for 450 years, and yet gunpowder still has a wider circulation. Never mind! Printer's ink is the greater explosive: it will win."
"Between ourselves, there is no such thing, abstractly, as a 'good' book. A book is 'good' only when it meets some human hunger or refutes some human error. "