William Stafford Quotes

There are few sights sadder than a ruined book.

Properly speaking, we learn from those books only that we cannot judge. The author of a book that I am competent to criticise would have to learn from me.

You couldn't unburn the books. You could only buy new ones.

In five minutes the earth would be a desert, and you cling to books.

So many (too many) books are published every year, and it seems everyone is writing a book. Perhaps we should all be reading more and writing less!

It is no more expected of most producers to read a book than it is, say, of Ted Williams to dust off home plate.

Of all the nations in the Western world, the United States, with the most money and the most time, has the fewest readers of books per capita. This is an incalculable loss. This, too, is one of the few civilized nations in the world which is unable to support a single magazine devoted solely to books.

Last night I thought about all the kerosene I've used in the past ten years. And I thought about books. And for the first time I realized that a man was behind each one of the books. A man had to think them up. A man had to take a long time to put them down on paper. And I'd never even thought that thought before...It took some man a lifetime maybe to put some of his thoughts down, looking around at the world and life, and then I come along in two minutes and boom! it's all over.

No; that doesn't interest me.' 'That's because you never read a book about it.

I can look at my books with pleasure from a distance. Four feet is close enough.

There are no bad books any more than there are ugly women.

Books are an attempt to control something that's uncontrollable.

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.

I thought, if I write a book that is not a retelling of Pride and Prejudice, it's not going to mean that I will not get any criticism. I might as well write the book that I want to write.

I owe everything I am and everything I will ever be to books.

Books hold most of the secrets of the world, most of the thoughts that men and women have had. And when you are reading a book, you and the author are alone together-just the two of you.

Reviewers do not read books with much care . . . their profession is more given to stupidity and malice and literary ignorance even than the profession of novelist.

Books are the best of things, well used; abused, among the worst...They are for nothing but to inspire.

Any book, which is at all important, should be reread immediately.

When I get hold of a book I particularly admire, I am so enthusiastic that I loan it to someone who never brings it back.

If you would be a reader, read; if a writer, write.

You can't expect that, after a poor fellow has written a book, he should also understand it.

He would talk to them of stories and books, and explain to them how stories wanted to be told and books wanted to be read, and how everything that they ever needed to know about life and the land of which he wrote, or about any land or realm that they could imagine, was contained in books. And some of the children understood, and some did not.

I asked people who have already finished books for advice, which is akin to asking a mother with a four-year-old what childbirth is like.

I heard that Trump said even smelling a book makes him feel tired.