Joe Queenan

“If you have read 6,000 books in your lifetime, or even 600, it's probably because at some level you find 'reality' a bit of a disappointment.”

“I do not accept reading tips from strangers, especially from indecisive men whose shirt collars are a dramatically different color from the main portion of the garment.”

“Here I am referring to the types of books that thirtyish women devour at private swim clubs, often to the dismay of their drowning children.”

“Good books to not invite unanimity. They invite discord, mayhem, knife fights, blood feuds.”

“Electronic books are ideal for people who value the information contained in them, or who have vision problems, or who like to read on the subway, or who do not want other people to see how they are amusing themselves, or who have storage and clutter issues, but they are useless for people who are engaged in an intense, lifelong love affair with books. Books that we can touch; books that we can smell; books that we can depend on.”

“People who prefer e-books...think that books merely take up space. This is true, but so do your children and Prague and the Sistine Chapel.”

“Reading is the way mankind delays the inevitable. Reading is the way we shake our fist at the sky. As long as we have these epic, improbable reading projects arrayed before us, we cannot breathe our last: Tell the Angel of Death to come back later; I haven't quite finished Villette.”

“My books have been part of my life forever. They have been good soldiers, boon companions. Every book has survived numerous purges over the years; each book has repeatedly been called onto the carpet and asked to explain itself. I own no book that has not fought the good fight, taken on all comers, and earned the right to remain. If a book is there, it is there for a reason.”

“A friend once told me that the real message Bram Stoker sought to convey in 'Dracula' is that a human being needs to live hundreds and hundreds of years to get all his reading done; that Count Dracula, basically nothing more than a misunderstood bookworm, was draining blood from the necks of 10,000 hapless virgins not because he was the apotheosis of pure evil but because it was the only way he could live long enough to polish off his extensive reading list. But I have no way of knowing if this is true, as I have not yet found time to read 'Dracula.”

“I have never squandered an opportunity to read.”

“Because to the poor, books are not diversions. Book are siege weapons.”

“Saddling another person with a book he did not ask for has always seemed to me like a huge psychological imposition, like forcing someone to eat a chicken biryani without so much as inquiring whether they like cilantro.”

“The problem with the English Patient is that to enjoy it, you have to be either English or patient.”

“...books, ingeniously coupled with music and alcohol, enabled the Irish to transcend reality.”

“Great writers say things that are so beautiful, the very act of repeating them makes life itself more beautiful.”