Charles Scribner Jr. Quotes

Common experience is the gold reserve which confers an exchange value on the currency which words are; without this reserve of shared experiences, all our pronouncements are checks drawn on insufficient funds.

So whenever I hear The Beatles I always feel I've got a lot in common with everybody else.

For me, what makes life enjoyable is having a shared culture and shared references.

The most technologically efficient machine that man has ever invented is the book.

I believe America wants and needs the shared experience of television. We far too often see in crises how television brings us together.

America's strength is not our diversity; our strength is our ability to unite people of different backgrounds around common principles. A common language is necessary to reach that goal.

I notice when I'm at a party where I don't know anybody - even if I have nothing in common with somebody - we can still talk because we were raised by the same TV and cartoons and movies.

When I sit down with filmmakers, I feel like we speak the same language in a lot of ways. We watch the same movies and have the same influences. If anything, it creates a dialogue that makes my work more effective.

O Day of days when we can read! The reader and the book, either without the other is naught.

'Awkward' implies both solidarity and implication. Nobody is exempt.

If a joke makes our tribe laugh, we assume it will make other friend-tribes laugh.

...the sun looks down on nothing half so good as a household laughing together over a meal, or two friends talking over a pint of beer, or a man alone reading a book that interests him..." - C.S. Lewis: Weight of Glory

You have with you the book you were reading in the cafe, which you are eager to continue, so that you can then hand it on to her, to communicate again with her through the channel dug by others' words, which, as they are uttered by an alien voice, by the voice of that silent nobody made of ink and typographical spacing, can become yours and hers, a language, a code between the two of you, a means to exchange signals and recognize each other.

Blessings be the inventor of the alphabet, pen and printing press! Life would be -- to me in all events -- a terrible thing without books.

Human contacts have been so highly valued in the past only because reading was not a common accomplishment.... The world, you must remember, is only just becoming literate. As reading becomes more and more habitual and widespread, an ever-increasing number of people will discover that books will give them all the pleasures of social life and none of its intolerable tedium.

The book is not completely written until someone else has read it.

People are living books. The real library of life is community.

COMMUNICATION: If I had to pick a first rule of communication-the one practice above all others that opens the door to connecting with others-it would be to look for common ground. Too often people see communication as the process of transmitting massive amounts of information to other people. But that's the wrong picture. Communication is a journey. The more that people have in common, the better the chance that they can take that journey together.

I write because I want to end my loneliness. Books make people less alone. That, before and after everything else, is what books do. They show us that conversations are possible across distances.

A nation isthe universality of citizens speaking the same tongue.

Indeed, learning to write may be part of learning to read. For all I know, writing comes out of a superior devotion to reading.

People talk of situations, read books, repeat quotations.

I learned to read at the age of five, in Brother Justiniano's class at the De la Salle Academy in Cochabamba, Bolivia. It is the most important thing that has ever happened to me. Almost seventy years later I remember clearly how the magic of translating the words in books into images enriched my life, breaking the barriers of time and space.

The most important thing in all human relationships is conversation, but people don’t talk anymore, they don’t sit down to talk and listen. They go to the theater, the cinema, watch television, listen to the radio, read books, but they almost never talk. If we want to change the world, we have to go back to a time when warriors would gather around a fire and tell stories.

That's what friendship means: sharing the prejudice of experience.