To achieve lasting literature, fictional or factual, a writer needs perceptive vision, absorptive capacity, and creative strength.

To achieve lasting literature, fictional or factual, a writer needs perceptive vision, absorptive capacity, and creative strength.

A book is one of the most patient of all man's inventions. Centuries mean nothing to a well-made book. It awaits its destined reader, come when he may, with eager hand and seeing eye. Then occurs one of the great examples of union, that of a man with a book, pleasurable, sometimes fruitful, potentially world-changing, simple; and in a library...witho ut cost to the reader.

This is the gift all writers seek-to write language that incandesces yet does not melt.

Books themselves need no defense. Their spokesmen come and go, their readers live and die, they remain constant.

What makes a book great, a so-called classic, it its quality of always being modern, of its author, though he be long dead, continuing to speak to each new generation.

Books are islands in the ocean of time. They are also oases in the deserts of time.