Christopher Morley Quotes

Good books are irrefutable, and bad books refute themselves.

The way a book is read, which is to say, the qualities a reader brings to a book can have as much to do with its worth as anything the author puts into it.

Nine-tenths of all existing books are nonsense.

That is, to me at least, one of the most helpful and useful things books do for us: They are generous enough to allow us to choose what matters to us.

A book cannot easily be too bad for the general public, but may easily be too good.

The only important thing in a book is the meaning that it has for you.

While a book has got to be worthwhile from the point of view of the reader it's got to be worthwhile from the point of view of the writer as well.

Good books get praised, bad books get praised. Good books get ignored, bad books get ignored

I still believe in stories. I still forget myself when I am in the middle of a good book. Books are for me, it must be said, the most important thing.

Life … is a bit like reading. … If all your responses to a book have already been duplicated and expanded upon by a professional critic, then what point is there to your reading? Only that it’s yours. Similarly, why live your life? Because it’s yours. But what if such an answer becomes less and less convincing?

The books that are really valuable are the books that evoke a sense of place.

Some men are more interesting than their books but my book is more interesting than its man.

There are some things fundamentally off about the stance of the book. And maybe that's okay; maybe every book is flawed, and great books, as flawed as they might be, articulate a moral argument that the reader then carries forward. The critique to this model is, of course, to ask: Should a book be ever so perfect that you come out of it with complete moral agreement that can be sustained?

What people value in their books—and thus what they count as literature—really tells you more about them than it does about the book.

People wonder why the novel is the most popular form of literature; people wonder why it is read more than books of science or books of metaphysics. The reason is very simple; it is merely that the novel is more true than they are.

The worth of a book is a matter of expressed juices.

The novels that get praised in the NY Review of Books aren't worth reading. Ninety-seven percent of science fiction is adolescent rubbish, but good science fiction is the best and only literature of our times.

Great books conserve time.

A sure sign of a good book is that you like it more the older you get.

Readers are less and less seen as mere non-writers, the subhuman "other" or flawed derivative of the author; the lack of a pen is no longer a shameful mark of secondary status but a positively enabling space, just as within every writer can be seen to lurk, as a repressed but contaminating antithesis, a reader.

There never yet have been, nor are there now, too many good books.

Until one has some kind of professional relationship with books, one does not discover how bad the majority of them are.

There are more truths in a good book than its author meant to put in it.

A book is judged, not by its reference to life, but by its reference to other books.

There is no book so bad that some good can not be got out of it.