"There are worse crimes than burning books. One of them is not reading them."

Brodsky, Joseph on Books - Reading
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"A book should be luminous not voluminous."

Bovee, Christian Nevell on Writers and Writing
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"Essential characteristic of the really great novelist: a Christ-like, all-embracing compassion."

Bennett, Arnold on Writers and Writing
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"The responsibility of a writer is to excavate the experience of the people who produced him."

Baldwin, James on Writers and Writing
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"A word is a bud attempting to become a twig. How can one not dream while writing? It is the pen which dreams. The blank page gives the right to dream."

Bachelard, Gaston on Writers and Writing
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"A professional writer is an amateur who didn't quit."

Bach, Richard on Writers and Writing
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"To write well, express yourself like common people, but think like a wise man. Or, think as wise men do, but speak as the common people do."

Aristotle on Writers and Writing
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"If the doctor told me I had six minutes to live, I'd type a little faster."

Asimov, Isaac on Writers and Writing
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"It is rarely that you see an American writer who is not hopelessly sane."

Anderson, Margaret on Writers and Writing
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"Every writer hopes or boldly assumes that his life is in some sense exemplary, that the particular will turn out to be universal."

Amis, Martin on Writers and Writing
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"For your born writer, nothing is so healing as the realization that he has come upon the right word."

Bowen, Catherine Drinker on Writers and Writing
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"Writers are the main landmarks of the past."

Bulwer-Lytton, Edward G. on Writers and Writing
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"I read the newspaper avidly. It is my one form of continuous fiction."

Bevan, Aneurin on Books - Reading
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"Where is human nature so weak as in the bookstore?"

Beecher, Henry Ward on Books - Reading
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"Some books are to be tasted; others to be swallowed; and some few to be chewed and digested."

Bacon, Francis on Books - Reading
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"Some books are undeservedly forgotten; none are undeservedly remembered."

Auden, W. H. on Books - Reading
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"I am not a speed reader. I am a speed understander."

Asimov, Isaac on Books - Reading
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"That is a good book which is opened with expectation, and closed with delight and profit."

Alcott, Amos Bronson on Books - Reading
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"Reading is a basic tool in the living of a good life."

Adler, Mortimer J. on Books - Reading
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"In the case of good books, the point is not how many of them you can get through, but rather how many can get through to you."

Adler, Mortimer J. on Books - Reading
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"The secret of good writing is to say an old thing in a new way or to say a new thing in an old way."

Davis, Richard Harding on Writers and Writing
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"The worst solitude is to have no real friendships."

Bacon, Francis on Friends and Friendship
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"One friend in a lifetime is much, two are many, three are hardly possible. Friendship needs a certain parallelism of life, a community of thought, a rivalry of aim."

Adams, Henry Brooks on Friends and Friendship
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"If I had to choose between betraying my country and betraying my friend, I hope I should have the guts to betray my country."

Forster, Edward M. on Betrayal
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"They talk of a man betraying his country, his friends, his sweetheart. There must be a moral bond first. All a man can betray is his conscience."

Conrad, Joseph on Betrayal
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This quotation can be viewed in the context of a book

"An archaeologist is the best husband a woman can have; the older she gets the more interested he is in her."

Christie, Agatha on Age and Aging
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"Every murderer is probably somebody's old friend."

Christie, Agatha on Friends and Friendship
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This quotation can be viewed in the context of a book

"I have often thought that if photography were difficult in the true sense of the term -- meaning that the creation of a simple photograph would entail as much time and effort as the production of a good watercolor or etching -- there would be a vast improvement in total output. The sheer ease with which we can produce a superficial image often leads to creative disaster."

Adams, Ansel on Photography
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"You had no right to be born; for you make no use of life. Instead of living for, in, and with yourself, as a reasonable being ought, you seek only to fasten your feebleness on some other person's strength."

Bronte, Charlotte on Parasites
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"To sit in the shade on a fine day, and look upon verdure is the most perfect refreshment."

Austen, Jane on Nature
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"Either write something worth reading or do something worth writing."

Franklin, Benjamin on Writers and Writing
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"Turn up the lights. I don't want to go home in the dark."

Henry, O. on Famous Last Words
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"There's always something fishy about the French."

Coward, Noel on Nations
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"All that we see or seem, is but a dream within a dream."

Poe, Edgar Allan on Dreams
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"The writer who neglects punctuation, or mispunctuates, is liable to be misunderstood for the want of merely a comma, it often occurs that an axiom appears a paradox, or that a sarcasm is converted into a sermonoid."

Poe, Edgar Allan on Grammar
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"I have a memory like an elephant. In fact, elephants often consult me."

Coward, Noel on Memory
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"I have great faith in fools; My friends call it self-confidence."

Poe, Edgar Allan on Self-confidence
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"There's nothing remarkable about it. All one has to do is hit the right keys at the right time and the instrument plays itself."

Bach, Johann Sebastian on Practice
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"From politics it was an easy step to silence."

Austen, Jane on Silence
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This quotation can be viewed in the context of a book

"For what do we live, but to make sport for our neighbors, and laugh at them in our turn?"

Austen, Jane on Neighbors
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