“There are books in which the footnotes, or the comments scrawled by some reader’s hand in the margin, are more interesting than the text. The world is one of these books.”

George Santayana

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“Starting out, I imagined a straightforward book in three parts, moving along a taut narrative path with a sturdy foundation of clay undergirding all. Books have their own fates, however, and research—at least the kind of research that I practice—yields to serendipity. If the destination is known beforehand, what’s the point of the journey? A provisional map of the whole allows the woolgathering pilgrim to get a little lost along the way without losing his bearings completely. Meanwhile, coincidences and chance meetings confirm a certain rightness, a fit, in the meandering quest.”

Christopher Benfey

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“Chapter books were my salvation, in the same way as Jesus was for other kids. Our family was always broke, but my parents always shelled out our version of a monthly bar bill for Scholastic paperbacks. Thank you, Astrid Lindgren; when you gave us Pippi Longstocking, you gave me life. I read the book like I read the first issue of Ms. magazine ten years later. The experience was like Helen Keller breaking the code for the word ‘water.’ I wanted to race around spreading the good news. I could breathe again, forever. There was going to be a spot for me in this joint, the earth, after all. It was never going to be a great match for someone as bright and strange as me, but books were going to make it survivable.”

Anne Lamott

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“Time was when readers kept commonplace books. Whenever they came across a pithy passage, they copied it into a notebook under an appropriate heading, adding observations made in the course of daily life. Erasmus instructed them how to do it; and if they did not have access to his popular De Copia, they consulted printed models or the local schoolmaster. The practice spread everywhere in early modern England, among ordinary readers as well as famous writers like Francis Bacon, Ben Jonson, John Milton, and John Locke. It involved a special way of taking in the printed word. Unlike modern readers, who follow the flow of a narrative from beginning to end (unless they are digital natives and click through texts on machines), early modern Englishmen read in fits and starts and jumped from book to book. They broke texts into fragments and assembled them into new patterns by transcribing them in different sections of their notebooks. Then they reread the copies and rearranged the patterns while adding more excerpts. Reading and writing were therefore inseparable activities. They belonged to a continuous effort to make sense of things, for the world was full of signs: you could read your way through it; and by keeping an account of your readings, you made a book of your own, one stamped with your personality.”

Robert Darnton

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“There are 15 floors of stacks with 64 rows of books per floor, running about 25 feet each; 6 or 7 shelves in each row. Can you actually browse there, find books on your own, faced with the dark phalanxes? You can, once you get subject areas in your head. Having made enough spot searches, you grasp the logic of each floor. There are no signs to help you, only diagrams with codes and numbers. You can also create luck in any given spot: You turn your head to the opposing row of books. A different subject area can arise, perhaps only partly to do with your areas of interest. This is non-link-based browsing. You can discover, instead of being endlessly sought.”

Ben Ratliff

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“My father used to say, of car after car, this is my last LaSalle, or Cadillac, or whatever, but it never was, at least not for longer than he expected. I feel quite sure this is my last book. Unless I am hit on the head with a falling rock and vast reservoirs of hitherto unperceived material are revealed to me. As it stands I feel pretty much that I have left no stone unturned.”

William Maxwell

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“So amazon knuckles the Justice Dept to knuckle Apple and the publishers for price fixing. Why? Amazon wants to charge $9.99 for every book, as if it were an undifferentiated commodity. Intellectual property is not frozen orange juice.”

Mary Karr

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“If poetry was a rope, then the books themselves were rafts. At my most precarious I balanced on a book, and the books rafted me over the tides of feelings that left me soaked and shattered.”

Jeanette Winterson

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“The more I read, the more I felt connected across time to other lives and deeper sympathies. I felt less isolated. I wasn’t floating on my little raft in the present; there were bridges that led over to solid ground. Yes, the past is another country, but one that we can visit, and once there we can bring back the things we need.”

Jeanette Winterson

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“There’s no question but that much of what is published in this country is cotton candy and that this cluttering-up of the bookstores damages writers. To say nothing of what such a diet does to the brain’s stomach, if you’re a reader. But you can’t complain about this too much; it’s a pluralism that allows R. Crumb and Walter Benjamin and William Gaddis and Julia Child all to live in paperback heaven together.”

Donald Barthelme

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“The vast trove of Brontë juvenilia is larger than all their published works put together. Most of the material was recorded in nearly microscopic handwriting, on tiny folded sheets of paper–some only 2 inches by 1½ inches. These were stitched and bundled together, complete with title pages and back covers made from scraps of wrapping paper and bags of sugar.”

Carmela Ciuraru

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“Today I got a letter from a man who said he had spent his childhood among characters such as I had portrayed. Poor man. He said since he had seen them in print they burdened his conscience less.”

Flannery O'Connor

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“Have you ever read the novels of Anthony Trollope? They precisely suit my taste,—solid and substantial, written on the strength of beef and through the inspiration of ale, and just as real as if some giant had hewn a great lump out of the earth and put it under a glass case, with all its inhabitants going about their daily business, and not suspecting that they were being made a show of.”

Anthony Trollope

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“It’s better, I think, for readers not to communicate too directly with an author because the author is, strangely enough, beside the point.”

Jeffrey Eugenides

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“Those of you who’ve seen my book—whatever you may think of its contents—will probably agree that it is a beautiful object. And if the physical book, as we’ve come to call it, is to resist the challenge of the e-book, it has to look like something worth buying and worth keeping.”

Julian Barnes

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