Books let us into their souls and lay open to us the secrets of our own.

How astonishingly intimate the business of fiction is, more intimate than anything that issues from the psychiatrist’s couch or even the lovers’ bed. You see the soul, pinned and wriggling on the wall.

Books delight to the very marrow of one's bones. They speak to us, consult with us, and join with us in a living and intense intimacy.

one’s style, one’s method of writing—these, I believe, truly reveal the face of one’s soul.

They had only ever discussed books but what, in this life, is more personal than books?

Somewhere here I want to bring in a learning which has been most rewarding, because it makes me feel so deeply akin to others. I can word it this way. What is most personal is most general. There have been times when in talking with students or staff, or in my writing, I have expressed myself in ways so personal that I have felt I was expressing an attitude which it was probable no one else could understand, because it was so uniquely my own…. In these instances I have almost invariably found that the very feeling which has seemed to me most private, most personal, and hence most incomprehensible by others, has turned out to be an expression for which there is a resonance in many other people. It has led me to believe that what is most personal and unique in each one of us is probably the very element which would, if it were shared or expressed, speak most deeply to others. This has helped me to understand artists and poets as people who have dared to express the unique in themselves.

Books are the mirrors of the soul.

Perhaps cinema is the most personal art, the most intimate. In cinema only the author's intimate truth will be convincing enough for the audience to accept.

The book is a private confessional form that provides a “point of view.”

Her soul belongs ​to words and​ books. Every time she ​reads she ​is home

I lived within the cover of books and those books were more real to me than any other thing in my life.

Strange, isn’t it? To love a book. When the words on the pages become so precious that they feel like part of your own history because they are. It’s nice to finally have someone read stories I know so intimately.

A book is as private and consensual as sex.

"Books let us into their souls and lay open to us the secrets of our own."

[The Sick Chamber (The New Monthly Magazine , August 1830)]