Edward Abbey Book Quotations

Music endures and ages far better than books. Books, made of words, are unavoidably attached to ideas, events, conflict, and history, but music has the power to transcend time. At least for a time. Palestrina sounds as fresh today as he did in 1555, but Dante, only three centuries older, already smells of the archaic, the medieval, the catacombs.

In order to write a book, it is necessary to sit down (or stand up) and write. Therein lies the difficulty.

The author: an imaginary person who writes real books.

Man's deliberate destruction of his own habitat -- planet Earth -- could serve as a mighty theme for a mighty book worthy of a modern Melville or Tolstoy. But our best fictioneers confine themselves to domestic drama -- soap opera with literary trimmings.

What we need now are heroes and heroines, about a million of them, one brave deed is worth a thousand books. Sentiment without action is the ruin of the soul.

Literature, like anything else, can become a wearisome business if you make a lifetime specialty of it. A healthy, wholesome man would no more spend his entire life reading great books than he would packing cookies for Nabisco.

I would not sacrifice a single living mesquite tree for any book ever written. One square mile of living desert is worth a hundred 'great books' - and one brave deed is worth a thousand.

We are befouling and destroying our own home, we are committing a slow but accelerating race suicide and life murder - planetary biocide. Now there is a mighty theme for a mighty book but a challenge to which no modern novelist or poet has yet responded. Where is our Melville, our Milton, our Thomas Mann when we need him most?

I've never yet read a review of one of my own books that I couldn't have written much better myself.

There comes a time in the life of us all when we must lay aside our books or put down our tools and leave our place of work and walk forth on the road to meet the enemy face-to-face. Once and for all and at last

How long does it take to write a good book? All of the years that you've lived.

My own best books have not been published. In fact, they've not even been written yet.

The response to my books from my East Coast friends has been wildly various, running the gamut from 'bad' to 'very bad.' (Is there another gamut?)

It is always dishonest for a reviewer to review the author instead of the author's book.

My books always make the best-seller lists in Wolf Hole, Arizona, and Hanksville, Utah.

When a writer has done the best that he can do, he should then withdraw from the book-writing business and take up an honest trade like shoe repair, cattle stealing, or screwworm management.

A good book is a kind of paper club, serving to rouse the slumbrous and to silence the obtuse.

Jane Austen: Getting into her books is like getting in bed with a cadaver. Something vital is lacking; namely, life.

Most new books drop immediately into the oblivion they so richly deserve.

There are only two kinds of books -- good books and the others. The good are winnowed from the bad through the democracy of time.

Books are like eggs -- best when fresh.

Readers, not critics, are the people who determine a book's eventual fate.

The best thing about graduating from the university was that I finally had time to sit on a log and read a good book.

Ah yes, the head is full of books. The hard part is to force them down through the bloodstream and out through the fingers.