Literary Collection Quotes

We are not quite novels. We are not quite short stories. In the end, we are collected works

Scholars have long dreamed of a universal library containing everything that has ever been written.

His eyes gravitated towards the wall-to-wall bookshelf at one end of the room. 'You folks like books, I see.

I regret all of my books.

Mr. Pewter led them through to a library, filled with thousands of antiquarian books. 'Impressive, eh?' 'Very,' said Jack. 'How did you amass all these?' 'Well,' said Pewter, 'You know the person who always borrows books and never gives them back?' 'Yes...?' 'I'm that person.

I collect books, primarily first-edition 20th-century fiction.

A shelf of classics for our young adults: Tolkien, Hesse, Casteneda, Kerouac, Salinger, Tom Robbins, and _The Last Whole Earth Catalog_.

I am an anthologist, you see. I sort of make anthologies for people.

Samuel Beckett is the person that I read the most of - certainly the person whose books I own the most of. Probably 800 or 900, maybe 1,000 books of just Samuel Beckett. By him, about him, in different languages, etc. etc. Notebooks of his, letters of his that I own, personal letters - not to me, but I bought a bunch of correspondence of his. I love his humor, and I'm always blown away by his syntax and his ideas. So I keep reading those.

A library is infinity under a roof.

I can look at my books with pleasure from a distance. Four feet is close enough.

I've got a book of poetry by the bed, one of these big collections that goes back to the Greeks and Romans.

I know that I am a small, weak man, but I have amassed a large library; I dream of dangerous places.

But what can a man see of a library being one day in it?

And Lopate's anthology helped a lot too. It came out the same year I started grad school, and I remember the book's publication feeling eventful and celebratory. It got a ton of attention for giving voice to this form that had sort of slipped between the cracks. That was exciting to see.

If a man’s house is full of medicine bottles, we infer the man is an invalid. But if his house is full of books, we conclude he is intelligent.

An anthology is like all the plums and orange peel picked out of a cake.

There is nothing for it but for all of us to invent our own ideal libraries of classics. I would say that such a library ought to be composed half of books we have read and that have really counted for us, and half of books we propose to read and presume will come to count—leaving a section of empty shelves for surprises and occasional discoveries

My great-grandfather was a self-taught man, and his library was extraordinary. I read the lot.

Let every man, if possible, gather some good books under his roof.

For a sampler, you could try my short story collection "Wireless". Which contains one novella that scooped a Locus award, and one that won a Hugo, and covers a range of different styles.

To a book collector, you see, the true freedom of all books is somewhere on his shelves.

I wrote the poems in Charms Against Lightning one by one, over almost a decade, and I did not write them toward any theme or narrative. But once I really got serious about putting together a book, I began to see that in fact there were themes across the poems, if only because my own obsessions had brought me back time and again to the same ground. I realized that any ordering of the poems would determine how those themes developed over the manuscript, and how the collection's dramatic conflicts were resolved.

Libraries are public treasuries. They're ways in which well-meaning societies leave the wealth of the past arranged A to Z so that anyone walking past can find it.

I have 800 books of just Samuel Beckett's work, tons of his correspondence, personal letters that he wrote. I have copies of plays he used when he directed, so all of his handwritten notes are in the corners of the page.