Melvil Dewey Quotes

Times change. Cable news and the Internet alone have transformed the way outreach to the American people can be accomplished.

To say the Internet is the death of books and movies is like saying someone invented a new, more efficient kind of cup and it heralds the death of coffee - a new improved form of carrying something, which is essentially what the Internet is, should be helpful to our business.

What we do is entertainment. We entertain people. Sometimes we inspire people, but sometimes we are just a way to fill their time.

You could probably go all the way back to the first books. I bet people said 'why should you read when you could talk to other people?' The point of reading is that you get to deeply immerse yourself in a person's perspective. Right? Same thing with newspapers or phones or TVs. Soon it will be VR, I bet.

I'm not in show business; I'm in the communications business. That's what it's about for me.

You gave me Christopher Robin, and then You breathed new life in Pooh. Whatever of each has left my pen Goes homing back to you. My book is ready, and comes to greet The mother it longs to see -- It would be my present to you, my sweet, If it weren't your gift to me.

A diary need not be a dreary chronicle of one's movements; it should aim rather at giving salient account of some particular episode, a walk, a book, a conversation.

Well, the world has a million writers. One would think, then, that good thought would be as familiar as air and water, and the gifts of each new hour would exclude the last. Yet we can count all our good books; nay, I remember any beautiful verse for twenty years.

Speak to me...be eloquent, be brilliant for me. Improvise! Rhapsodize!... I ask for cream and you give me milk and water... Please gather your dreams together into words. - Roxanne, Cyrano de Bergerac

They give us access to another world, they give us access to dreams. It's our way of living in a different realm for a short period of time - and how beautiful is that?

Writing does for me what giving milk does for a cow.

If someone can relate my guitar solo to an exercise in a book... that's no fun at all.

Just as art brings you to another place, so does religion - and to ask questions of factuality tends to reduce both. If you say you were inspired by a novel, that implies that your book is a work of fiction.

Today we are beginning to notice that the new media are not just mechanical gimmicks for creating worlds of illusion, but new languages with new and unique powers of expression.

And so I write the way I myself would like the book to be – if I were a child. I write for the child within me.

The author who benefits you most is not the one who tells you something you did not know before, but the one who gives expression to the truth that has been dumbly struggling in you for utterance.

Writing has so much to give, so much to teach, so many surprises.

What is truth? What is falsehood? Whatever gives wings to men, whatever produces great works and great souls and lifts up a man's height above the earth - that's true. Whatever clips off man's wings - that's false.

For me, the camera is a sketch book, an instrument of intuition and spontaneity.

I think that the best television now is giving you a three-act experience.

One night a friend lent me a book of short stories by Franz Kafka. I went back to the pension where I was staying and began to read The Metamorphosis. The first line almost knocked me off the bed. I was so surprised. The first line reads, “As Gregor Samsa awoke that morning from uneasy dreams, he found himself transformed in his bed into a gigantic insect. . . .” When I read the line I thought to myself that I didn’t know anyone was allowed to write things like that. If I had known, I would have started writing a long time ago. So I immediately started writing short stories.

The hallmark of an artist is generosity.

Books written out of fire give me a great deal of pleasure. You get the sense that the world for these writers could not have continued if the book hadn't been written. When you come across a book like that it is a privilege.

Flowers lead to books, which lead to thinking and not thinking and then more flowers and music, music. Then many more flowers and many more books.

I don't want to be anxious on my day-to-day life. I want to try to imagine a future I'd like to live in and then write books and do things that, in my own small way, make it more likely that that future will come to exist.