H. L. Mencken Quotes

I also really like to read good books and I don't have enough time to do it. So it's really hard for me to imagine willingly submitting myself to a trilogy of books that I've been told are at the fourth grade reading level which isn't a very nice thing to say but.

You really ought to read more books - you know, those things that look like blocks but come apart on one side.

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

When a new book is published, read an old one.

What's my favourite book? It changes all the time.

There are good books and there are bad books, period, that's the distinction.

Most books are three-thirds rubbish.

Between 1961 and 1982, 'The Catcher in the Rye' was the most censored book in high schools and libraries in the United States. But all the talk about banning it made me rush out to find it.

It's nice being married to someone who likes to read because you can indulge in geeky conversations about books.

Ive read an awful lot of books, Ive read alot of awful books

Books that are books are all that you want, and there are but a half dozen in any thousand.

I never read Ford Madox Ford's "The Good Soldier." I've been reading books that I should have read years ago and did not. That's one of them.

I began reading everyhing in the family library. Kidnapped, Treasure Island, Robinson Crusoe. And of course, if you're running out of books to read you can always read Shakespeare.

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.

Readers, censors know, are defined by the books they read.

Get stewed:Books are a load of crap.

We are too civil to books. For a few golden sentences we will turn over and actually read a volume of four or five hundred pages.

When I began to read as an adult, I read almost exclusively novelists of a generation back. I did the Russians, then I started getting more up to date. When you become published and become a reviewer, piles of books come along and you are pushed by fashion and what you are commissioned to do.

Of books in our time the variety is so voluminous, and they follow so fast from the press, that one must be a swift reader to acquaint himself even with their titles, and wise to discern what are worth reading.

I want people to read good work. If I see someone reading a book by Lorrie Moore or Jennifer Egan, I'm psyched. If I see them reading X Latin American Writer Who Sucks, I'm not psyched. But in terms of news, I do think that's important.

Some people claim that it is okay to read trashy novels because sometimes you can find something valuable in them. You can also find a crust of bread in a garbage can, if you search long enough, but there is a better way.

What about books? Well, precisely because you have denied it in every other field, you believe you may still grant yourself legitimately this youthful pleasure of expectation in a carefully circumscribed area like the field of books, where you can be lucky or unlucky, but the risk of disappointment isn't serious.

When a new book appears one should read an old one.

He told himself that he would have to start reading thicker books: they lasted longer, and made more comfortable pillows.

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