Reference Books Quotes

Don’t you love the Oxford Dictionary? When I first read it, I thought it was a really really long poem about everything.

Most young dealers of the Silicon Chip Era regard a reference library as merely a waste of space. Old Timers on the West Coast seem to retain a fondness for reference books that goes beyond the practical. Everything there is to know about a given volume may be only a click away, but there are still a few of us who'd rather have the book than the click. A bookman's love of books is a love of books, not merely of the information in them.

A lot of my time is spent reading antique or out-of-print books of reference.

There's no such thing as an unabridged dictionary.

[Instead of collecting stamps, he collected dictionaries and encyclopaedias:] Because you can learn more from them.

I always like to have an atlas just so that I can find things out. It's always good to have an almanac; those sort of things.

My dad sold encyclopedias and my mom worked in a factory office.

Generally, I read nonfiction. There's very little fiction that I enjoy enough to spend my time reading. I am generally a nonfiction guy.

[My wife] liked to collect old encyclopedias from second-hand bookstores, and at one point we had eight of them. When I wrote my first historical novel---back in 1980, before I was online---I used them often as a research tool. For instance, I learned that the Bastille was either 90 feet high or 100 feet or 120 feet. This led me to formulate Wilson's 22nd Law: 'Certitude belongs exclusively to those who only look in one encyclopedia.'

Old reference books are like tree rings. Without them, there'd be no way to know what a tree had lived through.

Oh, I collect facts and quotes when I can't write, and I can't write most of the time. I do a little chance operation sometimes where I flip through outdated reference books to see if anything will strike me as beautiful or momentous. Library roulette, I call it.

If I'm researching something strange and rococo, I'll go to the London Library or the British Library and look it up in books.

A very simple and useful device is to have a memorandum-book, so small that it can be easily carried in the pocket, to be used instead of your mind to keep note of any errand or any appointment that you may have. The Standard Diary, less than four inches long and less than two and a half inches wide, is one of the best for this purpose. ...In fact, such diaries as these, in their wide range of information, would seem to be all that one needs in practical life, the only other book that at all approaches them in this respect being unquestionably Webster's Unabridged Dictionary.

I have six or seven 'what to name the baby' books, the Oxford dictionary of names, and a fabulous tome that's 26 languages in simultaneous translation - French, German, all the European majors, plus Esperanto, Arabic, Hebrew, Chinese, Japanese, and so on.

I'm always reading many books at a time. It might be quite unorthodox, but what I do is, since I'm always surrounded with books, I'll read a page of physics, and then I'll read a chapter of a novel that I really love, and then I'll say, "Oh well, what does that mixture do in my head?" I adore reference books. I love encyclopedias. I also like just going back to original texts, because a lot of these self-help books today.

And that brings us to tonight's word: Truthiness. Now I'm sure some of the word-police, the 'wordanistas' over at Websters, are gonna say, 'Hey, that's not a word!' Well, anybody who knows me knows that I am no fan of dictionaries or reference books. They're elitist. Constantly telling us what is or isn't true, what did or didn't happen.

Dictionaries are always fun, but not always reassuring.

I ask for your indulgence when I march out quotations. This is the double syndrome of men who write for a living and men who are over forty. The young smoke pot - we inhale from our 'Bartlett's.'

I like to give people novels I think they would like, on no particular occasion - just when we're in a bookstore together. I like to receive reference books on my birthday.

I love reference books, especially collections of memorable quotations, world almanacs, and atlases. Facts to me are like candy or popcorn, small, tasty delights, and I like to gorge on them now and then.

On the analogy of 'Dictionary Johnson,' we call Fred R. Shapiro, editor of the just-published Yale Book of Quotations (well worth the $50 price), 'Quotationeer Shapiro.' Shapiro does original research, earning his 1,067-page volume a place on the quotation shelf next to Bartlett's and Oxford's.

Wait, Wikipedia isn't working? Why hasn't someone invented a paper version of it? A set of books organized alphabetically by topic?

Nobody reads a reference book to be amused, much less charmed.

My books are my tools, and the greater their variety and perfection the greater the help to my literary work.

Most consumers don't have a good metric for deciding on whether the dictionary they want to use is a good one... so they flip the book over, then go to the back, and it says, 'Over 250,000 entries.' And they go, 'Great, this dictionary must be awesome!'