Outside, across the putrid moat and under the dark mute trees, I would often lie and dream for hours about what I read in the books; and would longingly picture myself amidst gay crowds in...

I am really impressed by lawyers who write books and tell us that they never lost a case. Most lawyers who have never lost a case have not had enough hard cases. But there are...

In the first play, the crisis is Thomas More. In the second it’s Anne Boleyn. In the third book, and the third play, it’s crisis every day, an overlapping series of only just negotiable horrors....

Where they have burned books, they will end in burning human beings.

It was the yearning she related to. Shriver seemed to understand the specific human pain of wanting and pushing away at the same time. It left her with a gorgeous ache, and when she turned...

How to Lose Weight Through the Miracle of Diarrhea. That sounds like a bestselling Romance novel title if I’ve ever heard one. I’m a sucker for a good love story.

Maybe it was that nearly everyone else was dead and she felt a little bit dead too, but she figured that even a vampire deserved to be saved. Maybe she ought to leave him, but...

I write in a noisy, distracting world so the books can be read there.

Mishaps in life echoes for eternity. Weeks from now, I will be harvesting my glory. Imagine greater!

A book, for the Sufis, is an instrument as much as it is something to give information….The key is the teacher.

The most enjoyable book in the world is the phone book, because think of all the sex that went into creating the content.

Books are always obviously having conversations with other books, and some times they’re amiable and sometimes not.

boo” in book.

Writing is about taking everyday observations, things which people see almost every day of their lives, and yet bringing it to their attention for the very first time.

I always seem to be reading several books at once.

Thank God for books and music and things I can think about.”–Charlie Gordon

Jacksonville has more public libraries than people who know how to read.

A precious, mouldering pleasure ‘t isTo meet an antique bookIn just the dress his century wore;A privilege, I think,His venerable hand to take,And warming in our own,A passage back, or two, to makeTo times when...

There are times when I think that the ideal library is composed solely of reference books. They are like understanding friends—always ready to meet your mood, always ready to change the subject when you have...

But I loved the library simply because it was a library. I love libraries. I like reading, but I love libraries. Being surrounded by books makes me feel safe, the way some people need trees...

Don’t join the book burners. Don’t think you’re going to conceal faults by concealing evidence that they ever existed. Don’t be afraid to go in your library and read every book…

I do not think I ever opened a book in my life which had not something to say upon woman’s inconstancy. Songs and proverbs, all talk of woman’s fickleness. But perhaps you will say, these...

A little library, growing larger every year, is an honourable part of a man’s history. It is a man’s duty to have books. A library is not a luxury, but one of the necessaries of...

The first time I read an excellent work, it is to me just as if I gained a new friend; and when I read over a book I have perused before, it resembles the meeting...

If your library is not “unsafe,” it probably isn’t doing its job.

I feel closer ties and more intimate bonds with certain characters in books, with certain images I’ve seen in engravings, than with many supposedly real people with the metaphysical absurdity known as ‘flesh and blood’....

Knowing that others want to read my writing is the greatest inspiration to write.

I have managed not to finish certain books. With barely a twinge of conscience, I hurl down what bores me or doesn’t give what I crave: ecstasy, transcendence, a thrill of mysterious connection. For, more...

Et voilà, mon passé n’est plus qu’un trou énorme. Mon présent: cette bonne au corsage noir qui rêve près du comptoir, ce petit bonhomme. Tout ce que je sais de ma vie, il me semble...

It’s a symbiotic process, writing. What I am makes the books—not part of me, all of me—and then the books themselves inform the sense of what I am. So the more I can be, the...

So many books, so little time

You can’t just walk away when you see a good book but to buy and own it.

A friend once told me that the real message Bram Stoker sought to convey in ‘Dracula’ is that a human being needs to live hundreds and hundreds of years to get all his reading done;...

All I could determine was that it must have been a nice thing to see if it was a house you were thinking about moving into. But not so nice if it was the house...

One of the most difficult things when you were trying to navigate the world of books was dealing with all the unreliable authors. They were so unbelievably tricky to keep track of. An author might...

Maybe Heaven will be a library. Then I will be able to finish my to-read list.

121.George Bernard Shaw – Plays and Prefaces122.Max Planck – Origin and Development of the Quantum Theory; Where Is Science Going?; Scientific Autobiography123.Henri Bergson – Time and Free Will; Matter and Memory; Creative Evolution; The Two...

We don’t want to feel less when we have finished a book; we want to feel that new possibilities of being have been opened to us. We don’t want to close a book with a...

That’s what I love about reading: one tiny thing will interest you in a book, and that tiny thing will lead you to another book, and another bit there will lead you onto a third...

Lies Have expiry dates but the truth never expires

We’ll always need printed books that don’t mutate the way digital books do; we’ll always need places to display books, auditoriums for book talks, circles for story time; we’ll always need brick-and-mortar libraries.

I’ve developed a great reputation for wisdom by ordering more books than I ever had time to read, and reading more books, by far, than I learned anything useful from, except, of course, that some...

He kissed me for a long moment, holding my shoulders, perhaps to keep me from pressing my whole body against his. Then he tried to lift my bag.”My God,” he said. “What happened?””I found out...

I recall once seeing a commentary advertised as having been written in prison without recourse to other commentaries and by reliance on the Holy Spirit alone. I doubt whether those last two phrases are complementary....

No doubt my books too, like my mortal being, would eventually die, one day. But one has to resign oneself to dying. One accepts the thought that in ten years oneself, in a hundred years...

What refuge is there for the victim who is oppressed with the feeling that there are a thousand new books he ought to read, while life is only long enough for him to attempt to...

[I]t’s not just the books under fire now that worry me. It is the books that will never be written. The books that will never be read. And all due to the fear of censorship....

A censor is an expert in cutting remarks. A censor is a man who knows more than he thinks you ought to.

Yet the experience of reading a novel has certain qualities that remind us of the traditional apprehension of mythology. It can be seen as a form of meditation. Readers have to live with a novel...

The feedback I get is that my books are honest. I don’t sugar-coat anything. Life is really hard.