Book Quote by Patrick McGuinness

“Kafka noted in a letter to his friend Oskar Pollak that “some books seem like a key to unfamiliar rooms in one’s own castle.”

— David Mikics

Many a book is like a key to unknown chambers within the castle of one’s own self.

— Franz Kafka

Some books seem like a key to unfamiliar rooms in one’s own castle.

— Franz Kafka

Classics which at home are drowsily read have a strange charm in a country inn, or in the transom of a merchant brig.

— Ralph Waldo Emerson

I must have books everywhere. They're the soul of a room-they reveal the taste, the interests, and the secrets of whoever lives there.

— Diane von Furstenberg

I like books that explore identity and youth culture or rites of passage.

— Emily Weiss

“Contemporary literature, in each and every epoch, is the worst enemy of culture. A reader’s limited time is wasted in reading a thousand books…

— Nicolás Gómez Dávila

I like books steeped in the quotidian - details about work and place. You can learn how to run a chicken-and-waffle restaurant by reading…

— Laura Lippman

“daughter of the past who walked in all wide-eyed and exhaling like she’d finally found what she was looking for. It was a look…

— Patti Callahan Henry

There is that lovely feeling of one reader telling another, 'You must read this.' I've always wanted to write a book like that, with…

— Abraham Verghese

“Beauties” by Anton Chekhov, “The Doll’s House” by Katherine Mansfield, “A Perfect Day for Bananafish” by J. D. Salinger, “Brownies” or “Drinking Coffee Elsewhere”…

— Gabrielle Zevin

Regency literature was too coal-y for me, too long-winded and describey. I preferred modern books where you had to read other books explaining what…

— Sara Pascoe