How to quote a book

To quote a book, copy the words exactly, put them in quotation marks, and say who wrote them and where: the author, the title and, whenever you can, the page. Everything else (block quotes, ellipses, citation styles) is detail on top of that.

I studied literature, where quoting is half the job. Most of what follows I learned the hard way, with neon highlighters and red ink in the margins of my own essays.

#The three rules that always apply

• Exact words. Not a paraphrase, not the gist. Copy the line as it is printed, including its punctuation.

• Quotation marks. Double quotation marks in American English ("…"), single ones in British English ('…'). A quote inside a quote takes the other kind.

• The source. Who wrote it, in which book, and on which page.

If you only remember one thing: the line you will most want to quote later is always the one you didn't note the page for. Keep the page with the line from the start, wherever you collect your quotes.

#Let your sentence carry the quote

A quote shouldn't sit alone in your text like a stone. Lead into it with your own words:

• Woolf argues that a woman "must have money and a room of her own if she is to write fiction".

• As Woolf puts it in A Room of One's Own, "a woman must have money and a room of her own if she is to write fiction."

The quote has to fit the grammar of your sentence. If it doesn't, quote less of it.

#Page numbers

In an essay, the page number goes in brackets after the quote, in the format of your citation style (more below). In a letter, a card or a speech, you can leave it out. But keep it in your own notes. Future you will need it.

#Long quotes: block quotes

When a quote runs long, take it out of the sentence and set it as an indented block, without quotation marks. Where "long" begins depends on the style:

• MLA: more than four lines of prose, or more than three lines of poetry.

• APA: 40 words or more.

• Chicago: longer passages, roughly 100 words or more.

Use them sparingly. A block quote is a pause in your text, not a substitute for it.

#Leaving words out, and adding your own

• Cut words with an ellipsis: "a woman must have money … if she is to write fiction".

• Add or change a word with square brackets, so the quote fits your sentence: "[she] must have money and a room of her own".

Both are allowed only as long as the meaning stays the same. Cutting a "not" is not an edit, it's a forgery.

#Quoting poetry

For two or three lines of a poem inside your sentence, show the line breaks with a slash: "Hope is the thing with feathers / That perches in the soul". Longer passages go in a block, with the original line breaks.

#The citation styles at a glance

Which style you use depends on your school, your subject or your publisher. The basics:

• MLA (literature and humanities): author and page in brackets, (Woolf 23). The full book goes in a list of Works Cited at the end.

• APA (social sciences): author, year and page, (Woolf, 1929, p. 23), and a reference list at the end.

• Chicago (history and publishing): footnotes, or author and date like APA.

We'll go through each one in detail in separate notes. Whatever the style, the book's title is in italics; here's why titles go in italics, not quotation marks.

#Quoting outside school

Cards, toasts, eulogies, the first page of a book you give someone, the epigraph of your own novel. The rules relax, but two stay: the exact words, and the name of the person who wrote them. A quote without its author is a borrowed coat with the label cut out.

If you've got a line but no idea where it came from, here's how to find out what book a quote is from.