Sometimes it is the reader that sucks, not the book.

It takes a certain ingenuous faith – but I have it – to believe that people who read and reflect more likely than not come to judge things with liberality and truth.

With slouch and swing around the ringWe trod the Fools’ Parade!We did not care: we knew we wereThe Devils’ Own Brigade:And shaven head and feet of leadMake a merry masquerade.

Its better to hold a book between your Fingers than to Hold a Cigarette.

Some people are like rocks, they ground you but sometimes put you in a hard place. Others are like the wind, they spin you around and keep you on your toes but sometimes they are...

When I stepped into the brown-tiled entryway of the Kentwood Public Library, the sunlight flowing down on me from the high windows, I felt a sense of importance. It gratified me to be in a...

The imaginary is not formed in opposition to reality as its denial or compensation; it grows among signs, from book to book, in the interstice of repetitions and commentaries; it is born and takes shape...

I kissed my fingers,held my palm flat beside my mouth and blew it into the air that surrounded her memory. I closed my eyes, thinking this was one of those moments you see in movies...

It’s always so cool to think you are looking at today is something other people have been looking at for centuries. It’s the closest I’ve come to touching immortality, by reading the words of dead...

Books may well be the only true magic.

I’m very lucky. I’m very fortunate that my books have never gone out of print – none of them.

Saint John, in a moment of confusion, tells us not to love the world because “all that is in the world, the lust of the flesh, and the lust of the eyes, and the pride...

If there is no mystery, for the artist, to solve inside of his art, then there’s no point in it. . . . for me, every act of art is the act of solving a...

En tiempos de manipulación televisiva, leer es un acto revolucionario.

Doctor Who: You want weapons? We’re in a library. Books are the best weapon in the world. This room’s the greatest arsenal we could have. Arm yourself!(from Tooth and Claw in Season 2)

Reading doesn’t mean accepting everything you read, it means reasoning everything you read.

Now that I think about it, I was arrested in 1992. Some people may think of that as a bad thing, but I feel good about it. I chained myself to the gate of a...

The Old Testament is responsible for more atheism, agnosticism, disbelief—call it what you will—than any book ever written; it has emptied more churches than all the counterattractions of cinema, motor bicycle and golf course.

Let me alone,” said Mildred”Let you alone!” He almost cried out with laughter. “Letting you alone is easy, but how can I leave myself alone? That’s what’s wrong. We need not to be let alone....

There was going to be a spot for me in this joint, the earth, after all. It was never going to be a great match for someone as bright and strange as me, but books...

When you pick up a book, everyone knows it’s imaginary. You don’t have to pretend it’s not a book. We don’t have to pretend that people don’t write books. That omniscient third-person narration isn’t the...

Most of us do things for reasons that are more purely personal. For love, or for hate.

A book unwritten is a delightful universe of infinite possibilities. Set down one word, however, and it immediately becomes earthbound. Set down one sentence and it’s halfway to being just like every other bloody book...

A book is a garden, an orchard, a storehouse, a party, a company by the way, a counselor, a multitude of counselors.

That’s another argument for writing: making something that outlasts you.

Get someone-anyone-to read books to you. Having books read to you at any age is the supremo ultimato of living.

Books are all very well in their way, and we love them at Sagamore Hill; but children are better than books.

He passed his hands over some of the fine embossed bindings as he thought, I am a book also, words and thoughts and stories held together by flesh. We open and close ourselves to the...

Without a mission and a sense of whom you write for, you aren’t worth reading.

Share a book and you’ll make a friend!

Mi pare di aver capito una cosa, e cioè che la vita è questo, salire e poi scivolare più giù, e ricominciare a salire. Le scivolate non contano. L’importante è che il percorso nel suo...

Books are … companions, teachers, magicians, bankers of the treasures of mind. Books are humanity in print.

I was doing a show in L.A. called ‘Celebrity Autobiography,’ where celebrities read excerpts from other celebrities’ books and hang themselves with their own rope.

A book without words is a mind without thought.

I want to live simply. I want to sit by the window when it rains and read books I’ll never be tested on. I want to paint because I want to, not because I’ve got...

There is no ME without books; they’re everything I remember from childhood, from maturity … All that’s happened to me has been coloured, permanently, by my reading.

When I began writing The Night Bookmobile, it was a story about a woman’s secret life as a reader. As I worked it also became a story about the claims that books place on their...

We don’t need a list of rights and wrongs, tables of dos and don’ts: we need books, time, and silence. Thou shalt not is soon forgotten, but Once upon a time lasts forever.

Reading off a page is like looking down at a landscape from a balloon – your eye “sees” the story as well as reads it, its layout, its paragraphs and structure, and “remembers” what it...

My spirit has been around far longer than my soul–I’ve lived several lifetimes already. And one this novel has been written, I will have lived several more.

You not only are hunted by others, you unknowingly hunt yourself.

There are a couple of carp fishing books I’ve been reading. I’m very interested in that line of books, because I think they write very well, carp anglers, about the general environment.

There is a moonlight note in the Moonlight Sonata; there is a thunder note in an angry sky.

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

Whatever others may say, they say it to deceive and comfort themselves, not help you.

All that is necessary for a student is access to a library.

Usually, I set one foot in a library and I feel my own internal volume lower. A library is a physical equivalent of a sigh. It’s the silence, sure, but it’s also the certainty of...

Sonnet 23As an unperfect actor on the stage, Who with his fear is put besides his part,Or some fierce thing replete with too much rage,Whose strength’s abundance weakens his own heart; So I, for fear...

I love the longueurs of a book even if they seem pointless because you can get a peek into the author’s mind, a glimpse of their creative soul.

We read books. They make us think. It matters very little whether we agree with the books or not.