Honesty is the first chapter of the book wisdom.

Keisha Blake, whose celebrated will and focus did not leave her much room for angst, watched her friend ascend to the top deck in her new panda-eyed makeup and had a mauvais quart d’heure, wondering whether she herself had any personality at all or was in truth only the accumulation and reflection of all the...

It is time to browse through the precious books that have meant the most to you that you may rediscover illuminating phrases and sentences to light your pathway to the future…

Having had virtually no contact with the outside world for the last few weeks, Evan had temporarily forgotten the social norms governing shopping conduct or approaching celebrities in public.

Stories, like conjuring tricks, are invented because history is inadequate for our dreams.

Finding your passion is the key to your success. – Tracy Kauffman

Books are in the mind, Grandfather Alessandro said. Too many books and you forget your body is in the world.

But despite these and many other differences, Evan and Heeb had become close friends – an improbability that could have been produced only by the even greater improbabilities that brought them together.

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

Una biblioteca raffinata è come un intestino. Bisogna stare molto attenti a cosa ci si mette dentro. Si prende in considerazione soltanto ciò che è opportuno. Se in una biblioteca di questo genere dovesse capitare un libro che c’entra, sarebbe come se aveste distrattamente inghiottito qualcosa di non commestibile. Sareste presi dalla nausea e dal...

It’s a rare book that wins the battle against drooping eyelids.

There comes a time in every man’s life when his thoughts lightly turn to setting his library on fire. To burn away the jungle to let him find the books that most matter to him.

Books! tis a dull and endless strife:Come, hear the woodland linnet,How sweet his music! on my life,There’s more of wisdom in it.

You know you’ve read a good book when you turn the last page and feel a little as if you have lost a friend.

How many books are there?” said Masklin.”Hundreds! Thousands!””Do you know what they’re all about?”Gurder looked at him blankly. “Do you know what you’re saying?” he said.”No. But I want to find out.””They’re about everything! You’d never believe it! They’re full of words even I don’t understand!””Can you find a book which tells you how to...

Books were her refuge. Having set herself to learn the Russian language, she read every Russian book she could find. But French was the language she preferred, and she read French books indiscriminately, picking up whatever her ladies-in-waiting happened to be reading. She always kept a book in her room and carried another in her...

She’s a sailboat and I’m an anchor, pulling us both down.

When you are old and gray and full of sleep And nodding by the fire, take down this book, And slowly read, and dream of the soft look Your eyes had once, and of their shadows deep.

Vuole credere lei che sarei orgoglioso e felice di possedere un amico tra gli uomini? Ma fino ad ora ho avuto amici solo tra demoni, farfarelli, mostri oscuri e fantasmi afasiaci, vale a dire: tra letterati.

I pull my foot back again, but Four’s hands clamp around my arms, and he pulls me away from her with irresistible force. I breathe through gritted teeth, staring at Molly’s blood-covered face, the color deep and rich and beautiful, in a way. She groans, and I hear a gurgling in her throat, watch blood...

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

Books: open them. Your mind is calling for new horizons of knowledge and wonders.

You know, I don’t only play for the record books.

he’ll expect to find us exactly where he left us, never mind how much his life has changed in the meantime.

Sometimes you only get one chance to rewrite the qualities of the character you played in a person’s life story. Always take it. Never let the world read the wrong version of you.

Whenever you read a good book, somewhere in the world a door opens to allow in more light.

But once an original book has been written-and no more than one or two appear in a century-men of letters imitate it, in other words, they copy it so that hundreds of thousands of books are published on exactly the same theme, with slightly different titles and modified phraseology. This should be able to be...

The books we love offer a sketch of a whole universe that we secretly inhabit, and in which we desire the other person to assume a role.One of the conditions of happy romantic compatibility is, if not to have read the same books, to have read at least some books in common with the other...

In our fathers’ time nothing was read but books of feigned chivalry, wherein a man by reading should be led to none other end, but only to manslaughter and bawdry.

I never thought I’d fall madly in love with literature.

Well, the man who first translated the bible into English was burned at the stake, and they’ve been at it ever since. Must be all that adultery, murder and incest. But not to worry. It’s back on the shelves.

Lolita is famous, not I. I am an obscure, doubly obscure, novelist with an unpronounceable name.

I read a lot. I always have, but in those two years I gorged myself on books with a voluptuous, almost erotic gluttony. I would go to the local library and take out as many as I could, and then lock myself in the bedsit and read solidly for a week. I went for old...

One of my heroes, G.K. Chesterton, said, “The old fairy tales endure forever. The old fairy tale makes the hero a normal human boy; it is his adventures that are startling; they startle him because he is normal.” Discovering that the modern world can still contain the wonder and strangeness of a fairy tale is...

Currently, the Library of Congress houses eighteen million books. American publishers add another two hundred thousand titles to this stack each year. This means that at the current publishing rate, ten million new books will be added in the next fifty years. Add together the dusty LOC volumes with the shiny new and forthcoming books,...

…writers are a savage breed, Mr. Strike. If you want life-long friendship and selfless camaraderie, join the army and learn to kill. If you want a lifetime of temporary alliances with peers who will glory in your every failure, write novels.

Hard to remember these days that there was a time you had to wait for the ink and paper reviews to see your work excoriated. With the invention of the internet, any subliterate cretin can be Michiko Kakutani.

My books usually end where they began. I try to bring characters back to a point that is familiar but different because of the growth that they have gone through.

I tend to describe recurring themes as being part of a writer’s DNA – something so deeply embedded in us that even we don’t notice it until we’ve written three or four books.

In my early teens, I heard about Naked Lunch and its mutating typewriters and talking cockroaches. While I would hardly classify its dystopic vision as erotica now, at the time, Naked Lunch was my first foray into consuming smut. It was because of Burroughs that I knew about the particular musk that blooms when a...

As it stands there is a very strong argument that as the book trade becomes increasingly corporate it’s our literary heritage that is at risk – a vital part of our culture.

I’ve decided I don’t like books that end with ‘The End’. The fact that there are no more pages, suggests to me that the book has ended.

Researching books gets you into nothing but trouble.

There are as many different kinds of books as there are writers – as many different responses as there are readers.

We have more choice than ever before about where and how we buy and read books.

She curled sideways into the milky light of the bedside lamp and began to read.

Books have a vital place in our culture. They are the source of ideas, of stories that engage and stretch the imagination and most importantly, inspire.

I have no fear of men, as such, nor of their books. I have mixed with them–one or two of them particularly– almost as one of their own sex. I mean I have not felt about them as most women are taught to feel–to be on their guard against attacks on their virtue; for no...

Never give up. Dare to Dream. Dare to believe.

You write your books. You scatter your seeds. Rats might eat them, or they might rot. In California, some seeds lie dormant for decades because they only germinate after fire, and sometimes the burned landscape blooms most lavishly.