Richard Brinsley Sheridan Quotes

I'm writing a new book right now that is like an erotica manifesto.

I'm jackin' off reading Playboy on a hot afternoon, I'm a three time loser.

Books were a lot less messy than orgasms.

The logic: Reading is a private pursuit, one that often takes place behind closed doors. A young lady might retreat with a book, might even take it into her boudoir, and there, reclining on here silken sheets, imbibing the thrills and chills manufactured by writerly quills, one of her hands, one not absolutely needed to grip the little volume, might wander. The fear, in short, as one-handed reading. [p. 146]

The State insists that, by thus quarantining the general reading public against books not too rugged for grown men and women in order to shield juvenile innocence, it is exercising its power to promote the general welfare. Surely this is to burn the house to roast the pig...The incidence of this enactment is to reduce the adult population of Michigan to reading only what is fit for children.

I was reading the poems of Rochester. Rochester made himself out to be bisexual, but I think that was only to shock. Most of his poetry is sexual, even pornographic.

I read "The Group" by Mary McCarthy. It had tons of sex in it, or so I thought at the time.

One really understands testicles after reading 'The Family Jewels,' and one is gratified.

Librarians are hot. They have knowledge and power over their domain...It is no coincidence how many librarians are portrayed as having a passionate interior, hidden by a cool layer of reserve. Aren't books like that? On the shelf, their calm covers belie the intense experience of reading one. Reading inflames the soul. Now, what sort of person would be the keeper of such books?

To my mind there is nothing so beautiful or so provocative as a secondhand book store...To me it is astonishing and miraculous to think that any one of us can poke among the stalls for something to read overnight--and that this something may be the sum of a lifetime of sweat, tears, and genius that some poor, struggling, blessed fellow expended trying to teach us the truth.

All the secrets of the world are contained in books. Read at your own risk.

There weren't too many books by women that were taught in school, so I read those on my own, and the books I read were as accessible as the ones we were reading in school.

Orwell was dealing with communism and his disillusionment with communism in Russia and what he saw the communists do in Spain. His novel was a response to those political situations. Whereas I was interested in more things than the political atmosphere. I was considering the whole social atmosphere: the impact of TV and radio and the lack of education. I could see the coming event of schoolteachers not teaching reading anymore. The less they taught, the more you wouldn't need books.

Don't ask where the rest of this book is!" It is a shrill cry that comes from an undefined spot among the shelves. "All books continue in the beyond.

I was so long writing my review that I never got around to reading the book.

Be sure then to read no mean books. Shun the spawn of the press on the gossip of the hour. Do not read what you shall learn, without asking, in the street and the train.

Before you can become a writer, you have to be a reader, and a reader of everything, at that. To the best of my recollection, I became a reader at the age of 10 and have never stopped. Like many authors, I read all sorts of books all the time, and it is amazing how the mind fills up.

Read. It makes you more intelligent. It’s that simple. We all see the universe through the tiny keyhole of our own eyes, and every book is another keyhole from which you can gaze.

But I hope I will never have a life that is not surrounded by books, by books that are bound in paper and cloth and glue, such perishable things for ideas have lasted thousands of years . . . I hope I am always walled in by the very weight and breadth and clumsy, inefficient, antiquated bulk of them, hope that I spend my last days on this Earth arranging and rearranging them on thrones of good, honest pine, oak, and mahogany, because I just like to look at their covers, and dream of the promise of the great stories inside.

I love books. If they are good books, I love them even more. But even if they are bad books, I still love them.

Books can truly change our lives: the lives of those who read them, the lives of those who write them. Readers and writers alike discover things they never knew about the world and about themselves.

The truth is we're all probably more creative than we realize, except we spend our lives watching TV or reading somebody else's book. We never pick up a brush and stand in front of our own easel.

nothing decorates a home like books. There they are, waiting to decorate the mind, too!

You don’t want a general houseworker, do you? Or a traveling companion, quiet, refined, speaks fluent French entirely in the present tense? Or an assistant billiard-maker? Or a private librarian? Or a lady car-washer? Because if you do, I should appreciate your giving me a trial at the job. Any minute now, I am going to become one of the Great Unemployed. I am about to leave literature flat on its face. I don’t want to review books any more. It cuts in too much on my reading.

Lectures broke into one's day and were clearly a terrible waste of time, necessary no doubt if you were reading law or medicine or some other vocational subject, but in the case of English, the natural thing to do was talk a lot, listen to music, drink coffee and wine, read books, and go to plays, perhaps be in plays.