“The real war will never get in the books.”

The Paris Review interview (1994)
Context: When people ask me about LSD, I always make a point of telling them you can have the shit scared out of you with LSD because it exposes something, something hollow. Let’s say you have been getting on your knees and bowing and worshiping; suddenly, you take LSD and you look and there’s just a hole, there’s nothing there. The Catholic Church fills this hole with candles and flowers and litanies and opulence. The Protestant Church fills it with hand-wringing and pumped-up squeezing emotions because they can’t afford the flowers and the candles. The Jews fill this hole with weeping and browbeating and beseeching of the sky: How long, how long are you gonna treat us like this? The Muslims fill it with rigidity and guns and a militant ethos. But all of us know that’s not what is supposed to be in that hole. After I had been at Stanford two years, I was into LSD. I began to see that the books I thought were the true accounting books — my grades, how I’d done in other schools, how I’d performed at jobs, whether I had paid off my car or not — were not at all the true books. There were other books that were being kept, real books. In those real books is the real accounting of your life.

Source: Something Rotten

Source: If on a Winter's Night a Traveler

Source: The Absolutely True Diary of a Part-Time Indian

Reported by Lionel Trilling in "On the Modern Element in Modern Literature", Partisan Review, January-February 1961, p. 15 (reprinted in Trilling's Beyond Culture, 1965): Trilling wrote: "taking the cue of W. H. Auden's remark that a real book reads us, I have been read by Eliot's poems...".
More commonly reported as "a real book is not one that we read but one that reads us". This paraphrase of Trilling's reported quotation first appeared in a review by Robie Macauley of Trilling's Beyond Culture in the New York Times Book Review, 14 November 1965, p. 38: "I must borrow a phrase from Mr. Trilling (who borrows it from W. H. Auden): a real book is not one that we read but one that reads us." The same version, attributed to Auden, appears in Evan Esar, 20,000 Quips & Quotes (1968), p. 87 (with a comma after "we read"). There is no evidence that Auden ever wrote or said this version of the phrase.
Other variations (e.g. "not one that's read" for "not one that we read") seem to be misrecollections of Robie Macaulay's paraphrase.
Reported quotations

Source: Empire of the Sun (1984), p. 6
Context: Real war was the thousands of Chinese refugees dying of cholera in the sealed stockades at Pootung, and the bloody heads of Communist soldiers mounted on pikes along the Bund. In a real war no one knew which side he was on, and there were no flags or commentators or winners. In a real war there were no enemies.

Source: Clockwork Angel

Source: Gestalt Psychology. 1930, p. 143; About group formation

Source: To Kill a Mockingbird