All books are divisible into two classes: the books of the hour, and the books of all time.

It is impossible to read in America, except on a train, because of the telephone. Everyone has a telephone, and it rings all day and most of the night.

A best-seller is the gilded tomb of a mediocre talent.

No furniture so charming as books.

Hard-covered books break up friendships. You loan a hard-covered book to a friend and when he doesn't return it you get mad at him. It makes you mean and petty. But twenty-five-cent books are different.

In anything fit to be called by the name of reading, the process itself should be absorbing and voluptuous; we should gloat over a book, be rapt clean out of ourselves.

A great book should leave you with many experiences, and slightly exhausted at the end. You live several lives while reading it.

Books, like proverbs, receive their chief value from the stamp and esteem of ages through which they have passed.

In the best travel books the word alone is implied on every exciting page, as subtle and ineradicable as a watermark.

Books must be read as deliberately and reservedly as they are written.