Jorge Luis Borges Quotes

Any writer who gives a reader a pleasurable experience is doing every other writer a favor because it will make the reader want to read other books. I am all for it.

Whether it is fun to go to bed with a good book depends a great deal on who's reading it.

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

You're more likely to finish a book you enjoy, than one that feels like literary drudgery.

I'm an aesthetic empiricist. If you like something, it doesn't matter who made it. There really is no objective standard other than your own taste. You develop your own tastes, you find things that do or do not fit your tastes, and therefore are or are not 'good.' Whether they have been labeled as produced by the right person is another matter.

My criteria for what makes a book an official 'favorite,' is based almost entirely on how desperately I don't want the story to end.

Music is subjective to everyone's unique experience.

Most scholarly books we read for the information or insight they contain. But some we return to simply for the pleasure of the author's company.

I've always loved books.

A good book is always on tap; it may be decanted and drunk a hundred times, and it is still there for further imbibement.

We call beauty that which supplies us with a particular pleasure.

The virtue of books is to be readable.

Bread of flour is good; but there is bread, sweet as honey, if we would eat it, in a good book.

I enjoyed your article, but I preferred my own.

The happiest and most glorious hours of my life with books have been with German books.

What a joy is there in a good book, writ by some great master of thought, who breaks into beauty as in summer the meadow into grass and dandelions and violets, with geraniums and manifold sweetness.

I must warn you that the books I like are not necessarily the ones I think are the best. I like them for various reasons not always easy to explain.

So he lent her books. After all, one of life's best pleasures is reading a book of perfect beauty; more pleasurable still is rereading that book; most pleasurable of all is lending it to the person one loves: Now she is reading or has just read the scene with the mirrors; she who is so lovely is drinking in that loveliness I've drunk.

It's far easier to write why something is terrible than why it's good. If you're reviewing a film and you decide "This is a movie I don't like," basically you can take every element of the film and find the obvious flaw, or argue that it seems ridiculous, or like a parody of itself, or that it's not as good as something similar that was done in a previous film. What's hard to do is describe why you like something. Because ultimately, the reason things move people is very amorphous. You can be cerebral about things you hate, but most of the things you like tend to be very emotive.

Read anything I write for the pleasure of reading it. Whatever else you find will be the measure of what you brought to the reading.

I have the wonderful pleasure of finishing the book and closing it. And I don't read them later.

One's favorite book is as elusive as one's favorite pudding.

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.

Salter is a writer who particularly rewards those for whom reading is an intense pleasure. He is among the very few North American writers all of whose work I want to read, whose as-yet-unpublished books I wait for impatiently.