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"Who ever converses among old books will be hard to please among the new."
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"I don't have the feeling that as a very young person I read books that absolutely made their mark on my mind."
"The biggest markets for my books outside the UK are France and Italy, and those are the two countries where I also have the closest personal relationships with my translators - I don't know whether that's a coincidence, or if there's something to be learned from it."
"Some books mirror reality while others are entirely fantasy. My favorite are those that manage to weave both into a world."
"Even a book with completely empty pages will change you because you will start thinking about the reason behind this emptiness and once you enter the thinking territory it means that you entered a territory of change!"
"It was also a room full of books and made of books. There was no actual furniture; this is to say, the desk and chairs were shaped out of books. It looked as though many of them were frequently referred to, because they lay open with other books used as bookmarks."
"They want a lip print for their autograph books. I'm a sport; I go along."
"The writer I feel the most affinity with - you said you felt my books are 19th century novels, I think they're 18th century novels - is Fielding, Henry Fielding, he's the guy who does it for me."
"Books that you carry to the fire, and hold readily in your hand, are most useful after all."
"My books always begin with a sentence and an image - not necessarily connected."
"Always in my books, I like to throw that rogue element into a stable situation and then see what happens."
Explore more quotes by William Temple
"There cannot live a more unhappy creature than an ill-natured old man, who is neither capable of receiving pleasures, nor sensible of conferring them on others."
"When all is done, human life is, at the greatest and the best, but like a froward child, that must be played with and humored a little to keep it quiet till it falls asleep, and then the care is over."
"Our present time is indeed a criticizing and critical time, hovering between the wish, and the inability to believe. Our complaints are like arrows shot up into the air at no target: and with no purpose they only fall back upon our own heads and destroy ourselves."
"I have always looked upon alchemy in natural philosophy to be like enthusiasm in divinity, and to have troubled the world much to the same purpose."
"The first glass is for myself, the second for my friends, the third for good humor, and the forth for my enemies."
"Authority is by nothing so much strengthened and confirmed as by custom; for no man easily distrusts the things which he and all men have been always bred up to."
"The first ingredient in conversation is truth, the next good sense, the third good humor, and the fourth wit."
"Books, like proverbs, receive their chief value from the stamp and esteem of ages through which they passed."
"The best rules to form a young man, are, to talk little, to hear much, to reflect alone upon what has passed in company, to distrust one's own opinions, and value others that deserve it."
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