The courage of the poet is to keep ajar the door that leads into madness.

There is only one success-to be able to spend life in your own way.

Suppose someone tried to write your biography. What nonsense! How much would he know? Would he know what you thought when you looked in the subway slot-machine? How brutally you spoke when you were angry? How Nature rode you with a busy spur? How you fell on your knees late at night?

When you sell a man a book you don't sell just twelve ounces of paper and ink and glue - you sell him a whole new life. Love and friendship and humour and ships at sea by night - there's all heaven and earth in a book, a real book.

That's what this country needs -- more books!

The real purpose of books is to trap the mind into doing its own thinking.

Printer's ink has been running a race against gunpowder these many, many years. Ink is handicapped, in a way, because you can blow up a man with gunpowder in half a second, while it may take twenty years to blow him up with a book. But the gunpowder destroys itself along with its victim, while a book can keep on exploding for centuries.

The world has been printing books for 450 years, and yet gunpowder still has a wider circulation. Never mind! Printer's ink is the greater explosive: it will win.

Between ourselves, there is no such thing, abstractly, as a 'good' book. A book is 'good' only when it meets some human hunger or refutes some human error.

A doctor is advertised by the bodies he cures. My business is advertised by the minds I stimulate. And let me tell you that the book business is different from other trades. People don't know they want books. I can see just by looking at you that your mind is ill for lack of books but you are blissfully unaware of it!

There is no mistaking a real book when one meets it. It is like falling in love, and like that colossal adventure it is an experience of great social import. Even as the tranced swain, the booklover yearns to tell others of his bliss. He writes letters about it, adds it to the postscript of all manner of communications, intrudes it into telephone messages, and insists on his friends writing down the title of the find. Like the simple-hearted betrothed, once certain of his conquest, “I want you to love her, too!” It is a jealous passion also. He feels a little indignant if he finds that any one else has discovered the book, too.

There is no mistaking a real book when one meets it. It is like falling in love.

If we discovered that we had only five minutes left to say all that we wanted to say, every telephone booth would be occupied by people calling other people to stammer that they loved them.

When you sell a man a book you don't sell him just 12 ounces of paper and ink and glue - you sell him a whole new life.

Even the most innocent of men's affairs seem doomed to cause suffering. Pushing the lawnmower through tall wet grass, and enjoying the strong aroma of the morning, I found that the blades had cut a frog in half. I have not forgotten his eyes.

Read, every day, something no one else is reading. Think, everyday, something no one else is thinking. Do, every day, something no one else would be silly enough to do. It is bad for the mind to continually be part of unanimity.

Living in a bookshop is like living in a warehouse of explosives. Those shelves are ranked with the most furious combustibles in the world--the brains of men.

We’ve had bad luck with our kids – they’ve all grown up.

Life's a lot different from what people pretend. That's why pretending is fun. I used to think it was some special wickedness of my own that made such queer things happen. Now I'm beginning to guess that everybody's like that.

In every man's heart there is a secret nerve that answers to the vibrations of beauty.

No man is lonely while eating spaghetti:it requires so much attention.

A good book ought to have something simple about it. And, like Eve, it ought to come from somewhere near the third rib: there ought to be a heart beating in it. A story that's all forehead doesn't amount to much.

Poetry is like an unexpected noise in the night: the creak of a door, a footstep on the porch, the soft scuffle of a moth against the screen, which rouses every sense to an instant alert. So comes poetry to the drowsy mind, which startles a moment, wonders, and returns to sleep.

Night, I have discovered, has a faintly bitter taste, caused by its large ingredient of Un-attained Possibility.

Books are the immortality of the race, the father and mother of most that is worth while cherishing in our hearts. To spread good books about, to sow them on fertile minds, to propagate understanding and a carefulness of life and beauty, isn't that high enough mission for a man?

Read, every day, something no one else is reading. Think, every day, something no one else is thinking. Do, every day, something no one else would be silly enough to do. It is bad for the mind to be always part of unanimity.

High heels were invented by a woman who had been kissed on the forehead.

The bicycle, the bicycle surely, should always be the vehicle of novelists and poets.

There is only one success — to be able to spend your life in your own way.

They go in not because they need any certain volume but because they feel that there may be some book that needs them.

We have all sorts of conditions of booksellers: one is fanatic on the subject of libraries. He thinks that every public library should be dynamited. Another thinks that moving pictures will destroy the book trade. What rot! Surely everything that arouses people's minds, that makes them alert and questing, increases their appetite for books. - Roger Mifflin

New York is Babylon : Brooklyn is the truly Holy City.New York is the city of envy, office work, and hustle;Brooklyn is the region of homes and happiness….There is no hope for New Yorkers, for their glory inTheir skyscraping sins; but in Brooklyn there is the wisdom of the lowly.

New York, the nation's thyroid gland.

New York the nation's thyroid gland.

A town that has no ceiling price A town of double-talk A town so big men name her twice Like so: 'N'Yawk N'Yawk.'

We've had bad luck with our kids - they've all grown up.

Continually one faces the horrible matter of making decisions. The solution ... is as far as possible to avoid conscious rational decisions and choices simply to do what you find yourself doing to float in the great current of life with as little friction as possible to allow things to settle themselves as indeed they do with the most infallible certainty.

The enemies of the future are always the very nicest people.

There are three ingredients in the good life learning earning and yearning.

Any man worth his salt has by the time he is forty-five accumulated a crown of thorns and the problem is to learn to wear it over one ear.

No man is lonely while eating spaghetti - it requires so much attention.

There are three ingredients in the good life: learning earning and yearning.

There are three ingredients in the good life: learning earning and yearning.

The unluckiest insolvent in the world is the man whose expenditure is too great for his income of ideas.

If we all discovered that we only had five minutes left to say all that we wanted to say every telephone booth would be occupied by people calling other people to tell them that they loved them.

If we all discovered that we had only five minutes left to say all that we wanted to say every telephone booth would be occupied by people calling other people to tell them that they loved them.

Big shots are only little shots who keep shooting.

Time is a flowing river. Happy those who allow themselves to be carried unresisting with the current. They float through easy days. They live unquestioning in the moment.

The courage of the poet is to keep ajar the door that leads into madness.

My theology briefly Is that the universe Was dictated But not signed.

There is only one success-to be able to spend your life in your own way.

There is only one success - to be able to spend your life in your own way.

Big shots are only little shots who keep shooting.

There is only one success-to be able to spend your life in your own way.

All cities are mad: but the madness is gallant. All cities are beautiful: but the beauty is grim.

It is unfair to blame man too fiercely for being pugnacious he learned the habit from Nature.

When you sell a man a book you don’t sell him just 12 ounces of paper and ink and glue—you sell him a whole new life.