Robert Louis Stevenson Book Quotations

Books are good enough in their own way, but they are a poor substitute for life.

The most influential books, and the truest in their influence, are works of fiction. They repeat, they re-arrange, they clarify the lessons of life; they disengage us from ourselves, they constrain us to the acquaintance of others; and they show us the web of experience, but with a singular change-that monstrous, consuming ego of ours being, nonce, struck out.

Go, little book, and wish to all Flowers in the garden, meat in the hall, A bin of wine, a spice of wit, A house with lawns enclosing it, A living river by the door, A nightingale in the sycamore!

We were to found a University magazine. A pair of little, active brothers-Livingstone by name, great skippers on the foot, great rubbers of the hands, who kept a book-shop over against the University building-had been debauched to play the part of publishers. We four were to be conjuct editors and, what was the main point of the concern, to print our own works; while, by every rule of arithmetic-that flatterer of credulity-the adventure must succeed and bring great profit. Well, well: it was a bright vision.

The full truth of this odd matter is what the world has long been looking for and the public curiosity is sure to welcome.

Every book is, in an intimate sense, a circular-letter to the friends of him who writes it.

The difficulty of literature is not to write, but to write what you mean; not to affect your reader, but to affect him precisely as you wish.

If you are going to make a book end badly, it must end badly from the beginning.

In anything fit to be called by the name of reading, the process itself should be absorbing and voluptuous; we should gloat over a book, be rapt clean out of ourselves.

I kept always two books in my pocket, one to read, one to write in.