Some books are to be tasted, others to be swallowed, and some few to be chewed and digested.

We were never organized readers who would see a book through to its end in any sory of logical order. We weave in and out of words like tourists on a hop-on, hop-off bus tour....

Early on I set out to write the next Great American Novel, and then later on I set out the silverware and enjoyed my dinner in silence.

Whether it’s books or TV, or whatever the case may be, the backbone of what I do is my restaurants.

An extrovert looks at a stack of books and sees a stack of papers, while an introvert looks at the same stack and sees a soothing source of escape.

they’re simple stories. Real life is a story, too, only much more complicated. It’s still got a beginning, a middle, and an end. Everyone follows the same rules, you know. . . It’s just that...

Objects and ObjectivesTo contemplate LEGO. Many colours. Many shapes. Many inventive and useful shapes. Plastic. A versatile and practical substance. Symbolic of the resourcefulness of man. Oil taken from the depths of the very earth....

Too many thousands of opened books yawned between them and him. He had exiled himself.

Reading relaxes me.

Parents who daily read Robert Lewis Stevenson to their children and surrounds them with blocks, plastic animals, and some cardboard boxes or kitchen pots and pans are going to produce a qualitatively different child from...

People disappear when they die. Their voice, their laughter, the warmth of their breath. Their flesh. Eventually their bones. All living memory of them ceases. This is both dreadful and natural. Yet for some there...

A friendship with the Lord will sustain you in difficult times.

Knocking on a door is so violent. Instead, try talking to the door to get it to open up to you. I should write a self-help book for door-to-door salesmen.

It is only by choice that our true nature is revealed.

But, for instance, when I was awfully young, I read all the Oz books. They were an enormous influence on me.

The worst thing about new books is that they keep us from reading the old ones.

I wanted to know what it was like to be a drug addict, and have an eating disorder, and have a loved one die, and fall in love. I saw my friends going through these...

Books on the bookshelvesAnd stacked on the floorBooks kept in basketsAnd propped by the doorBooks in neat pilesAnd in disarrayBooks tucked in closetsAnd books on displayBooks filling cranniesAnd books packed in nooksBooks massed in windowsAnd...

We read privately, mentally listening to the author’s voice and translating the writer’s thoughts. The book remains static and fixed; the reader journeys through it.

Now may this little Book a blessing beTo those that love this little Book, and me:And may its Buyer have no cause to say,His money is but lost, or thrown away.

I wasn’t reading poetry because my aim was to work my way through English Literature in Prose A–Z.But this was different.I read [in, Murder in the Cathedral by T.S. Eliot]: This is one moment, /...

Timing is always off. Someone is always late, always lost, always looking back to the start of a reality that they didn’t want to begin with.

Books are my greatest treasure.

Because to the poor, books are not diversions. Book are siege weapons.

My bookcase is all yours.”I walked to the door. “I’ve just decided that those are my favorite five words in the world.

Read good books to improve yourself.

A quiet secluded life in the country, with the possibility of being useful to people to whom it is easy to do good, and who are not accustomed to have it done to them; then...

Your story must told.Live a life legacy- written book or notes.This will be there for many generations to know your rich experiences and knowledge.

I had already found that it was not good to be alone, and so made companionship with what there was around me, sometimes with the universe and sometimes with my own insignificant self; but my...

Another thing I need to do, when I’m near the end of the book, is sleep in the same room with it…Somehow the book doesn’t leave you when you’re asleep right next to it.

She’d felt it before, she felt it now: the pull to fall in with him, to fall into him, to lose her sense of self.

Education is for freedom – freedom from mental slavery.

Books crowbar the world open for you.

We read novels because we need stories; we crave them; we can’t live without telling them and hearing them. Stories are how we make sense of our lives and of the world. When we’re distressed...

You know what pulp is, Mr. Tallis? It’s the flesh of a luscious fruit, mashed down into an incredible, half liquid richness. so saturated with flavor that it fills your whole body, not just your...

I understand that when people read my books that there’s something there – but I don’t identify with it.

When writers die they become books, which is, after all, not too bad an incarnation.”[As attributed by Alastair Reid in Neruda and Borges, The New Yorker, June 24, 1996; as well as in The Talk...

Good friends, good books, and a sleepy conscience: this is the ideal life.

Things change after you die, though- I guess because dying is about the lonliest thing you can do.

I remember that story. You have read it four times.” Samson shrugged. “Why should I stop with the first reading? Nobody says, ‘That was a fine piece of music. I’ll never listen to that again.”...

He was giving her the most important thing he could, the only way he knew how. He was a professor, a lover of stories, and he was building her a library in the same way...

He was like a book, where each chapter picks up pace until you can’t put it down. That’s when you know you’ve made a friend – when you want to read more of his story.

I think that pretty much every form of fiction (I’d include fantasy, obviously) can actually be a real escape from places where you feel bad, and from bad places. It can be a safe place...

I always say, ‘Books beat boredom,’ said Amanda wisely.

Rule number one: Don’t fuck with librarians.

how weird it would be to have around you only as many books as you have time to read in the rest of your life. And I remain deeply attached to the physical book and...

I think to be writer you have to enjoy being alone. I was a loner as a teenager and was always drawn to characters in books and films who were at the fringes.

To literary critics a book is assumed to be guilty until it proves itself innocent.

Life isn’t really short. There are just too many good books to read in one lifetime.

There is in Albert Camus’ literary craftsmanship a seductive intelligence that could almost make a reader dismiss his philosophical intentions if he had not insisted on making them so clear.