writers quote daily

Groucho on books and reading

Outside of a dog, a book is man's best friend. Inside of a dog, it's too dark to read.--Groucho Marx. 

Masters on the love of books

...books are piled on our tables, spill in heaps from stuffed shelves, and lie about the floor and on chairs like spoiled pets. I have a miser's greed for books, and I pick them up at random to read a passage or follow an argument or inhabit a poem. I carry them from room to room, portable transitions of thought, of the past into the present, only to put them down in a maddening disorder. Guests sometime ask, "Have you read all these books?" My answer must be no. But they are there for me to read, or reread someday. If I am to have welath it is in my books, and when I regard their spines presed together on the bookshelves, observe the casual sculptures they make on a table, my spirit becomes cozily furnished.--Hillary Masters, In Rooms of Memory: Essays

Elizabeth Drew on literature

The test of literature is, I suppose, whether we ourselves live more intensely for the reading of it.--Elizabeth Drew