The more a book is like an ...

The more a book is like an opium pipe, the more the Chinaman reader is satisfied with it and tends to discuss the quality of the drug rather than its lethargic effects.
The more a book is like an opium pipe, the more the Chinaman reader is satisfied with it and tends to discuss the quality of the drug rather than its lethargic effects.
 Julio Cortazar

More phrases

Amores Perros and Once Were Warriors had a tremendous visceral quality that really influenced me.
 Brendan Fletcher
We are all warriors. Each of us struggles every day to define and defend our sense of purpose and integrity, to justify our existence on the planet and to understand, if only within our own hearts, who we are and what we believe in.
 Steven Pressfield
If one man kills a hundred men, and another man masters himself, the second man is the much greater warrior.
You may abandon your own body but you must preserve your honour.
 Miyamoto Musashi
Man is the only animal that blushes - or needs to.

Quotes from the same author

Now that I think about it, it seems to me that’s what Idiocy is: the ability to be enthusiastic all the time about anything you like, so that a drawing on the wall does not have to be diminished by the memory of the frescoes of Giotto in Padua.
 Julio Cortazar
We know that attention acts as a lightning rod. Merely by concentrating on something one causes endless analogies to collect around it, even penetrate the boundaries of the subject itself: an experience that we call coincidence, serendipity – the terminology is extensive. My experience has been that in these circular travels what is really significant surrounds a central absence, an absence that, paradoxically, is the text being written or to be written.
 Julio Cortazar
We no longer believe because it is absurd: it is absurd because we must believe.
 Julio Cortazar
Only by living absurdly is it possible to break out of this infinite absurdity.
 Julio Cortazar
The modern story begun, one might say, with Edgar Allan Poe, which proceeds inexorably, like a machine destined to accomplish its mission with the maximum economy of means.
 Julio Cortazar