Lawrence Clark Powell Quotes

Literature illuminates life only for those to whom books are a necessity.

What's a book? Everything or nothing. The eye that sees it all.

Writers are storytellers. So are readers.

I love it when people want to interpret my books.

All our work, our whole life is a matter of semantics, because words are the tools with which we work, the material out of which laws are made, out of which the Constitution was written. Everything depends on our understanding of them.

Symbols are the imaginative signposts of life.

Writing and reading fiction is, I think, a human effort to make sense of the world.

I hope children will be happy with the books I've written, and go on to be readers all of their lives.

I think really good books can be read by anybody.

I think movies do play a valuable role in turning people on to the act of reading. I think that phenomenon just creates readers. At first they're going to love 'Harry Potter,' or they may love 'The Hunger Games,' but after that, they're going to love the act of reading and wonder, 'What else can I read?'

Our high respect for a well read person is praise enough for literature.

These are not books, lumps of lifeless paper, but minds alive on the shelves.

I can't actually wrap my mind around it easily - I can't really visualize what 2 million books looks like... So I try to keep it real for myself by focusing on individual anecdotes of how my books have helped kids learn to love reading.

I was a book lover from the beginning. I loved, love, words and images and ideas, the ways a book can make you feel things deeply or help you understand something you never even knew there were words for.

Even when poetry has a meaning, as it usually has, it may be inadvisable to draw it out... Perfect understanding will sometimes almost extinguish pleasure.

Life is like an analogy.

People forget that writers start off being readers. We all love it when we find a terrific read, and we want to let people know about it.

For some 25 years, I worked as a librarian, first at the New York Public Library, then at Trenton State College in New Jersey. My life has always been with, around, and for books.

I love to read, and I like the fact that there's some silence in my life.

All my life I've looked at words as though I were seeing them for the first time.

Without literature my life would be miserable.

Reading is as much a part of life as any part, and it's life itself. And it allows us to live other lives that we might not have lived if we hadn't picked up those books.

We shouldn't teach great books; we should teach a love of reading. Knowing the contents of a few works of literature is a trivial achievement. Being inclined to go on reading is a great achievement.

I believe that sometimes, when we talk about books, we're talking about the big picture - how they're relevant.

In reading, we are both scientists and poets.