James Branch Cabell Book Quotations

I was born, I think, with the desire to make beautiful books — brave books that would preserve the glories of the Dream untarnished, and would re-create them for battered people, and re-awaken joy and magnanimity.

American literature was enriched with Men Who Loved Allison .... Of the actual and eventual worth of this romance I cannot pretend to be an unprejudiced judge. The tale seems to me one of those many books which have profited, very dubiously indeed, by having obtained, in one way of another, the repute of being indecent.

A book , once it is printed and published, becomes individual. It is by its publication as decisively severed from its author as in parturition a child is cut off from its parent. The book "means" thereafter, perforce, both grammatically and actually, whatever meaning this or that reader gets out of it.