Lawrence Clark Powell

“I have always been reconciled to the fact that I was born a bibliomaniac, never have I sought a cure, and my dearest friends have been drawn from those likewise suffering from book madness.”

“Writing is a solitary occupation. Family, friends, and society are natural enemies of the writer. He must be alone, uninterrupted and slightly savage if he is to sustain and complete an undertaking.”

“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, books, books in all their aspects, in form and spirit, their physical selves and what reading releases from their hieroglyphic pages, in their sight and smell, in their touch and feel to the questing hand, and in the intellectual music which they sing to the thoughtful brain and loving heart, books are to me the best of all symbols, the realest of all reality.”

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

“Unless their use by readers bring them to life, books are indeed dead things.”

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

“Write to be understood, speak to be heard, read to grow.”