books

"In our time a secret manifesto is being written. Its language is a longing we read in one another's eyes. It is the longing to know our authentic vocation in the world, to find the work and the way of…"

"Google newsreader access to the alt.fan.douglas-adams Usenet newsgroup"

"Riches are a cause of evil, not because, of themselves, they do any evil, but because they goad men on so that they are ready to do evil."

"If you tell certain people that you like Kerouac, they assume that’s all you read, like you don’t know anything else about literature. I recognize all the things that people dislike about the way he w…"

"All we are now concerned with is the search for “new and improved” version of whatever means are already available for attaining goals such means make possible. The value of the goals themselves is ir…"

"The Darwin Digital Library of Evolution"

"The default designation of poetry has become written poetry. That's why we have to prefix the adjective "oral," because the unmodified noun no longer covers anything but written poetry. That's also wh…"

"Up, and at my chamber all the morning and the office doing business, and also reading a little of L'escholle des filles, which is a mighty lewd book, but yet not amiss for a sober man once to read ove…"

"… if anyone thinks they can get an accurate picture of anyplace on the planet by reading news reports, they're sadly mistaken."

"Mervyn Peake is a finer poet than Edgar Allan Poe, and he is therefore able to maintain his world of fantasy brilliantly through three novels. It is a very, very great work … a classic of our age."

"Books are the friends of solitude. They develop individuality and freedom. In solitary reading a man who is seeking himself has some chance of finding himself."

"Rowling got millions of young people reading, who grew up to be consumers who branched out into other authors and genres. You shouldn’t yell at her. You should thank her."

"One of the most widespread diseases is diagnosis."

"The 20th century has been a badly written drama, from the beginning. The opposite of a Greek drama. Act one: Greed and hypocrisy leading to a genocidal world war, a boom, a crash, totalitarianism. Act…"

"Dana Milbank discusses his new book - January 2008"

"The only reason I read a book is because I cannot see and converse with the man who wrote it."

"Not only did waging war against Hitler fail to save the Jews, it may be that the war itself brought on the Final Solution of genocide. This is not to remove the responsibility from Hitler and the Nazi…"

"Reading for me was a refuge. I could escape from everything that was miserable in my life and I could be anyone I wanted to be in a story, through a character. It was almost sinful how much I liked it…"

"I always enjoyed doing monster books. Monster books gave me the opportunity to draw things out of the ordinary. Monster books were a challenge — what kind of monster would fascinate people? I couldn’t…"

"J.G. Ballard: The Glow of the Prophet" by Diane Johnson in The New York Review of Books"