Walter Benjamin Quotes

Alex loved books. He was the one who first introduced me to poetry. That's another reason I can't read anymore.

A good preface must be the root and the square of the book at the same time.

If the Sunday had not been observed as a day of rest during the last three centuries, I have not the slightest doubt that we should have been at this moment a poorer people and less civilized.

I like a book to be full of the memory of what it is, a voice in an endless conversation, and yet at the same time to be new.

The book is a unit and is such a brilliant ergonomic unit.

The last thing that we find in making a book is to know what we must put first.

Who remembers when we used to rest on Sunday instead of Monday?

The book, like the bicycle, is a perfect form.

Even as a kid, my memories are of books taking me out of myself.

When I feel that I'm going to write a detective story, I buy a five pound box of chocolates and a ream of paper. When the candy is all gone and the paper all used up, I know that the book is long enough.

Every great literature has always been allegorical - allegorical of some view of the whole universe. The 'Iliad' is only great because all life is a battle, the 'Odyssey' because all life is a journey, the Book of Job because all life is a riddle.

What do all my books have in common? A commitment to memory.

And what would happen if we never read the classics? There comes a point in life, it seems to me, where you have to decide whether you're a Person of Letters or merely someone who loves books, and I'm beginning to see that the book lovers have more fun.

In a way, that's also a recognition that Dante needs Virgil and that the Inferno needs the Aeneid and that the epic needs a model and that for Dante to write this great poem he needs someone to come before him and he turns to Virgil's text, especially book six where Aeneas goes down into the underworld. And for me, that's a model of the poet's relationship to previous poetry, to another poetry as calling out for guidance.

I still remember the day my father took me to the Cemetery of Forgotten Books for the first time.

nobody ever wrote to me saying"you know ender's game was a pretty good book, but you know what it really needs a n introduction!".....so be assured the novel stands on its own, and if you skip this intro and go straight to the story, i not only won't stand in your way i'll even agree with you!

Sometime during your life—in fact, very soon—you may find yourself reading a book, and you may notice that a book’s first sentence can often tell you what sort of story your book contains.

Does people not asking me about Asian American literature mean they don't see it as its own literary tradition? I certainly believe in it as its own literary tradition, because your race plays a great factor in how you are seen by the world, and how you see the world; the fact that I'm an Asian American isn't incidental to who I am as a writer. Where it becomes difficult is defining what, if anything identifiable at all, makes an Asian American book an Asian American book, other than the fact of its creator being Asian. And I'd argue that there is nothing identifiable beyond that.

I never spent less than two years on the text of one of my picture books, even though each of them is approximately 380 words long. Only when the text is finished ... do I begin the pictures.

I learned to read at the age of five, in Brother Justiniano's class at the De la Salle Academy in Cochabamba, Bolivia. It is the most important thing that has ever happened to me. Almost seventy years later I remember clearly how the magic of translating the words in books into images enriched my life, breaking the barriers of time and space.

I, alone, could never have produced this book. I say this mainly in case there are lawsuits.

My grandmother stepped back into the kitchen to get their drinks. I had come to love her more after death than I ever had on Earth. I wish I could say that in that moment in the kitchen she decided to quit drinking, but I now saw that drinking was a part of what made her who she was. If the worst of what she left on Earth was a legacy of inebriated support, it was a good legacy in my book. ~Susie's grandmother, Lynn pgs 315-316

There's the excitement of adding color, which I didn't know anything about until 1997 or so, when I did my first picture book. So, the kid's book in particular have been exciting for me because it forced me to go back to the work I loved as a young boy reading Sunday's supplements and comics in the Sunday papers when I was six, seven, eight, nine. And number of which have been in wonderful collections, beautifully reproduced.

Old age is - a lot of crossed off names in an address book.