My breath catches, responding to an unfamiliar pull in my chest, an ache in my soul. I shouldn’t miss him, but I do; this boy who had every right to pull that trigger, and instead...

Everybody in the world ought to care for books, and if there are some who do not, why that is a perfectly convincing reason why books ought to be given to them, to be a...

There’s only about about 6 to 8 inches between an open book and a human being’s heart. A lot can happen in those 7 inches. Perspectives, fresh perspectives occur and minds expand, and I love...

…books were better than travel.

I have never been able to resist a book about books.

Shelving books incorrectly is as good as stealing them. It’s almost worse.

Jon Ronson makes me laugh. I’ve read all of his books.

If you cannot read all your books, at any rate handle, or as it were, fondle them – peer into them, let them fall open where they will, read from the first sentence that arrests...

I cannot explain love. I could not tell you if I loved you the first moment I saw you, or if it was the second or third or fourth. But I remember the first moment...

I read in self-defense.

And books, they offer one hope — that a whole universe might open up from between the covers, and falling into that universe, one is saved.

Not one-tenth of them. I don’t suppose you use your Sevres china every day?

Old is old at any age. Old is when you quit asking questions about this, that, and everything. Old is when you forget how to love-or worse, don’t care. Old is when you don’t want...

The books that help you the most are those which make you think the most.

All books are either dreams or swords,You can cut, or you can drug, with words.

You read a book for the story, for each of its words,” Gordy said, “and you draw your cartoons for the story, for each of the words and images. And, yeah, you need to take...

More books, more racing and more foolishness with cars and motorcycles are in the works.

We live for books.

Reading Gives Us Some Place To Go, When We Have To Stay Where We Are.

The contents of someone’s bookcase are part of his history, like an ancestral portrait.”(About Books; Recoiling, Rereading, Retelling, New York Times, February 22, 1987)

I profess to learn and to teach anatomy not from books but from dissections, not from the tenets of Philosophers but from the fabric of Nature.

I am drawn mostly, insistently to the human voice. How powerful and necessary the solo voice, the experience of being someone, something else for a little while. This is and will remain literature’s killer app,...

We read books to find out who we are. What other people, real or imaginary, do and think and feel… is an essential guide to our understanding of what we ourselves are and may become.

I inhaled the musty, leathery, old-papery scent and a shiver passed over me. If I had any idea of heaven, it was this: shelves and shelves of books, ten times as many as were upstairs,...

The act of true reading is in its very essence democratic. Consider the nature of what happens when we read a book – and I mean, of course, a work of literature, not an instruction...

One wants to tell a story, like Scheherezade, in order not to die. It’s one of the oldest urges in mankind. It’s a way of stalling death.

I asked her what a true story was because I thought that all stories were made up. She said a true story was called fact, and a made-up story was called ficton. Auntie May said...

Sound unbound by nature becomes bounded by art.

Some stories consumed you, they made time stop, your worries float into the ether, and when it came to my reading habits I chose romance over any other genre. The appeal of the happy ever...

It is time to float on the waters of the night. Time to wrap my arms around this book and press it to my chest, life preserver in a sea of unremarkable men and women,...

When you fail, embrace it. Bleed. Get hurt. Lose your religion. That’s the only way you will do amazing things.

The light teaches you to convert life into a festive promenade.

This is what drives a young writer out of his head, this feeling that nothing is being said.

As it unfolded, the structure of the story began to remind me of one of those Russian dolls that contain innumerable ever-smaller dolls within. Step by step the narrative split into a thousand stories, as...

Learning became her. She loved the smell of the book from the shelves, the type on the pages, the sense that the world was an infinite but knowable place. Every fact she learned seemed to...

Peter Pan has to be the book of my childhood. Come to think of it, it’s the book of my adulthood too. It’s a book which, in the reading of it, takes me back to...

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.

Publishing a book is like being pregnant. By the end, you’re just ready to get that baby out!

Since the time of Voltaire and two-chamber Government, which is at bottom simply distrust and personal self-examination, and gives the popular mind that bad habit of being suspicious, the Church of France seems to have...

She is never alone when she has Her Books. Books, to her, are Friends. Give her Shakespeare or Jane Austen, Meredith or Hardy, and she is Lost – lost in a world of her own....

He began to read at haphazard. He entered upon each system with a little thrill of excitement, expecting to find in each some guide by which he could rule his conduct; he felt himself like...

Kwa sababu ya udadisi wa hali ya juu nasoma kila kitu ninachokutana nacho hasa vile visivyonipendeza. Ukitaka kupata maarifa usisome tu vitabu vinavyokupendeza. Soma vitabu visivyokupendeza.

Now, 75 years [after To Kill a Mockingbird], in an abundant society where people have laptops, cell phones, iPods, and minds like empty rooms, I still plod along with books.[Open Letter, O Magazine, July 2006]

Sono convinto che chi non legge resta uno stupido. Anche se nella vita sa destreggiarsi, il fatto di non ingerire regolarmente parole scritte lo condanna ineluttabilmente all’ignoranza, indipendentemente dai suoi averi e dalle sue attività.

I couldn’t live a week without a private library – indeed, I’d part with all my furniture and squat and sleep on the floor before I’d let go of the 1500 or so books I...

It had been startling and disappointing to me to find out that story books had been written by people, that books were not natural wonders, coming up of themselves like grass. Yet regardless of where...

I spent much of my prison time reading. I must have read over 200 large books, mostly fictional stories about the American pioneers, the Vikings, Mafia, etc. As long as I was engrossed in a...

Censorship of anything, at any time, in any place, on whatever pretense, has always been and always will be the last resort of the boob and the bigot.

She liked books more than anything else, and was, in fact, always inventing stories of beautiful things and telling them to herself.

Have you thought of an ending?””Yes, several, and all are dark and unpleasant.””Oh, that won’t do! Books ought to have good endings. How would this do: and they all settled down and lived together happily...