We built tall buildings, but we have not become any taller.

It’s remarkable that a device, which fits in your pocket, can hold thousands of books. But a room full of books is an entirely different kind of remarkable.

I will say I am the sum of my books.

Once you read a book it becomes a part of you forever

A smoke, a book, a cup of coffee. These are the little things that get us through this sometimes weary world and all the rainy days.

each copy of a book has its own unique personality. Reading a book from the library is not the same as reading another copy of the same book from the same library, which is again...

… in art nothing is more secondary than the author’s intentions.

Some people claim that it is okay to read trashy novels because sometimes you can find something valuable in them. You can also find a crust of bread in a garbage can, if you search...

Old words are reborn with new faces.

Honesty is the first chapter of the book wisdom.

The most exciting part of writing a novel is when the characters take control of the story

Teams that spend a lot of time learning the tricks of the trade will probably never really learn the trade.

If one cannot enjoy reading a book over and over again, there is no use in reading it at all.

What gunpowder did for war, the printing press has done for the mind.

Reading is important. If you know how to read then the whole world opens up to you

I guess that’s the beauty of books. When they finish they don’t really finish.

Our generation in the west was lucky: we had readymade gateways. We had books, paper, teachers, schools and libraries. But many in the world lack these luxuries. How do you practice without such tryout venues?

I take six or seven years to write really small books. There is a kind of aesthetic of leanness, of brevity.

The more sins you confess, the more books you will sell.

I hope people of the future will remember my books for being burned, and I challenge an elite few to imagine the embers of the last copy.

Feel it, deal with it, then throw it away

I write literary biographies, so above all, I have to love the subject’s books. But choosing a subject is tough.

A library could show you everything if you knew where to look.

One of the things I learned, one of the strangest things, is how to think. There was nothing else to do. I couldn’t see people, or go for a walk in the forest. All I...

You call that a kiss?

A literary academic can no more pass a bookstore than an alcoholic can pass a bar.

For this quiet, unprepossessing, passive man who has no garden in front of his subsidised flat, books are like flowers. He loves to line them up on the shelf in multicoloured rows: he watches over...

Old books that we have known but not possessed cross our path and invite themselves over. New books try to seduce us daily with tempting titles and tantalizing covers.

But to her, libraries were like hotels: secret villages inhabited by passing strangers from a thousand different worlds brought together just for a few hours.

A library is an ever-growing entity; it multiples seemingly unaided, it reproduces itself by purchase, theft, borrowings, gifts, by suggesting gaps through association, by demanding completion of sorts.

I am not scared of anyone. I will write and publish my books.

Most of what makes a book ‘good’ is that we are reading it at the right moment for us.

People need books like zombies need brains.

My passion has always been books and literature, and teaching.

(…) alguns livros são tão bons que queremos lê-los uma e outra vez. Afeiçoamo-nos a eles.Tornam-se…bom, tornam-se um pouco a nossa familia.

I wrote “David” because it seemed to me that children, who can love a book more passionately than any grown person, got such a lot of harmless entertainment and not enough real, valuable literature.

As I lay there watching Robin sleep beside me, I realized that she was right all along. I didn’t need to live in a castle — a shack in the woods with her would do...

The word ‘NO’ is the best motivation there is for the storyteller in you.

The book is a film that takes place in the mind of the reader. That’s why we go to movies and say, “Oh, the book is better.

Still, though reading absorbed her, what the Queen had not expected was the degree to which it drained her of enthusiasm for anything else.

I was very fond of strange stories when I was a child. In my village-school days, I used to buy stealthily popular novels and historical recitals. Fearing that my father and my teacher might punish...

The things you don’t know or understand are as important as your desire to know them. This is the relationship of man to mystery.

Associate with the noblest people you can find; read the best books; live with the mighty; but learn to be happy alone.

Wake up. Be thankful. For whatever happens on this day, you are endlessly given the chance to start again-to be alive. And all of us should wish for that.

It’s not all bad. Heightened self-consciousness, apartness, an inability to join in, physical shame and self-loathing—they are not all bad. Those devils have been my angels. Without them I would never have disappeared into language,...

Books were once cherished belongings of people, that they weren’t always just neglected and collecting dust.

There are magic moments, involving great physical fatigue and intense motor excitement, that produce visions of people known in the past (“en me retraçant ces détails, j’en suis à me demander s’ils sont réels, ou...

magic” of friendship, art, community, and social activism. Although most of his books have not been published specifically for adolescents and young adults, nonetheless young readers find them and embrace them with particular passion. I’ve...

There are books for when you’re bored. Plenty of them. There are books for when you’re calm. The best kind, in my opinion. There are also books for when you’re sad. And there are books...

Reading a book is like re-writing it for yourself. You bring to a novel, anything you read, all your experience of the world. You bring your history and you read it in your own terms.