Charles Clarke Quotes

Our pleasures in literature do not, I think, decline with age; last 1st of January was my eighty-second birthday, and I think that I had as much enjoyment from books as I ever had in my life.

You need have no dull hours if you are a sincere lover of books.

I enjoy books as misers enjoy treasures, because I know I can enjoy them whenever I please.

To encounter a fine book and have time to read it is a wonderful thing.

Oh! I am delighted with the book! I should like to spend my whole life in reading it.

The greatest pleasure of reading consists in re-reading.

I'm a slow reader, but I usually get through seventy or eighty books a year, most fiction. I don't read in order to study the craft; I read because I like to read

Books are a hard-bound drug with no danger of an overdose. I am the happy victim of books.

Some of the sweetest hours in life, in retrospect will be found to have been spent with books.

Book lovers will understand me, and they will know too that part of the pleasure of a library lies in its very existence.

I declare after all there is no enjoyment like reading! How much sooner one tires of any thing than of a book! -- When I have a house of my own, I shall be miserable if I have not an excellent library.

I am too fond of reading books to care to write them.

The wonderful thing about books is you never run out of them, you can just keep going. So I'm always finding new writers, or old writers that I just happen not to have read.

I cannot live without books: but fewer will suffice where amusement, and not use, is the only future object.

A taste for books, which is still the pleasure and glory of my life.

And as for me, thogh that I can but lyte, On bakes for to rede I me delyte, And to hem yeve I feyth and ful credence, And in myn herte have hem in reverence So hertely, that ther is game noon, That fro my bokes maketh me to goon, But hit be seldom, on the holyday; Save, certeynly, when that the month of May Is comen, and that I here the foules singe, And that the floures ginnen for to springe, Farwel my book and my devocion.

And how could anyone consent to give up the smell of open books, old or new?

There is only one way to read, which is to browse in libraries and bookshops, picking up books that attract you, reading only those, dropping them when they bore you, skipping the parts that drag-and never, never reading anything because you feel you ought, or because it is part of a trend or a movement. Remember that the book which bores you when you are twenty or thirty will open doors for you when you are forty or fifty-and vise versa. Don’t read a book out of its right time for you.

In the highest civilization the book is still the highest delight.

This is not about money or anything other than the pleasure of reading for people who want to read it.

I have always been a reader; I have read at every stage of my life, and there has never been a time when reading was not my greatest joy

Read the most useful books, and that regularly and constantly.

He liked to read with the silence and the golden color of the whiskey as his companions. He liked food, people, talk, but reading was an inexhaustible pleasure. What the joys of music were to others, words on a page were to him.

I read library books as fast as I could go, rushing them home in the basket of my bicycle. From the minute I reached our house, I started to read. Every book I seized on, from “Bunny Brown and His Sister Sue at Camp Rest-a-While” to “Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea,” stood for the devouring wish to read being instantly granted. I knew this was bliss, knew it at the time. Taste isn’t nearly so important; it comes in its own time.

Of all things I liked books best.