Lawrence Clark Powell Quotes

19 quotes in 372 categories

• 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…
• The good writer, the great writer, has what I have called the three S's: the power to see, to sense, and to say. That is,…
• I can speak of my own criterion for judging whether or not a book is good or bad. I ask of it a single question,…
• [A writer] must try to think clearly, to feel deeply, to write honestly. If he is fortunate he will make a living, but his work…
• This is the gift all writers seek-to write language that incandesces yet does not melt.
• No university in the world has ever risen to greatness without a correspondingly great library... When this is no longer true, then will our civilization…
• 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…
• Books are islands in the ocean of time. They are also oases in the deserts of time.
• 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…
• Believers and doers are what we need - faithful librarians who are humble in the presence of books.... To be in a library is one…
• Write to be understood, speak to be heard, read to grow.
• Books themselves need no defense. Their spokesmen come and go, their readers live and die, they remain constant.
• 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…
• 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, books, books in all their aspects, in form and spirit, their physical selves and what reading releases from their hieroglyphic pages, in their sight…
• I can speak of my own criterion for judging whether or not a book is good or bad. I ask of it a single question,…
• 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…

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