Best Quotes by Lawrence Clark Powell (Top 10)

  1. Write to be understood, speak to be heard, read to grow.
  2. 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.
  3. To achieve lasting literature, fictional or factual, a writer needs perceptive vision, absorptive capacity, and creative strength.
  4. Books themselves need no defense. Their spokesmen come and go, their readers live and die, they remain constant.
  5. Unless their use by readers bring them to life, books are indeed dead things.
  6. 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.
  7. 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 have come to an end.
  8. 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 speak to each new generation.
  9. 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.
  10. 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, he is perceptive, he is feeling, and he has the power to express in language what he observes and reacts to.