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

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

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.

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

We all think were going to be great and we feel a little bit robbed when our expectation aren't met, but sometimes our expectations sell us short. Sometimes the expected simply pales in comparison to the Write to be understood, speak to be heard, read to grow.

We are the children of a technological age. We have found streamlined ways of doing much of our routine work. Printing is no longer the only way of reproducing books. Reading them, however, has not changed.

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