Books can truly change our lives: the lives of those who read them, the lives of those who write them. Readers and writers alike discover things they never knew about the world and about themselves.

I bought some books in order to learn the first principles of philosophy.

Books are not absolutely dead things, but do contain a potency of life in them to be as active as that soul was whose progeny they are; nay they do preserve as in a vial...

There’s a different flavor to children’s literature you read after you grow up than there was reading it as a child. Things that were sweet as a child become bitter once you grow up.

We owe it to each other to tell stories.

It’s the best way of telling the truth; it’s a process of producing grand, beautiful, well-ordered lies that tell more truth than any assemblage of facts. Beyond that … [it’s] delight in, and play with,...

I guess that’s the beauty of books. When they finish they don’t really finish.

Our generation in the west was lucky: we had readymade gateways. We had books, paper, teachers, schools and libraries. But many in the world lack these luxuries. How do you practice without such tryout venues?

I take six or seven years to write really small books. There is a kind of aesthetic of leanness, of brevity.

The more sins you confess, the more books you will sell.

I hope people of the future will remember my books for being burned, and I challenge an elite few to imagine the embers of the last copy.

Feel it, deal with it, then throw it away

I write literary biographies, so above all, I have to love the subject’s books. But choosing a subject is tough.

A library could show you everything if you knew where to look.

One of the things I learned, one of the strangest things, is how to think. There was nothing else to do. I couldn’t see people, or go for a walk in the forest. All I...

Nobody steals books but your friends.

And every book, you find, has its own social group–friends of its own it wants to introduce you to, like a party in the library that need never, ever end.

I’d never heard of the ‘Lord of the Rings’, actually. So I went to the bookstore and there it was, three shelves of books about Tolkien and Middle-earth, and I was like, ‘Holy cow, what...

We read in slow, long motions, as if drifting in space, weightless. We read full of prejudice, malignantly. We read generously, making excuses for the text, filling gaps, mending faults. And sometimes, when the stars...

Home is where your books are.

He’s as tense as I am, maybe even more so, but it’s so hard to reconcile that with the serenity of weightlessness. His faux-blond hair is floating out away from his head. He’s wearing a...

Books are health food for your brain and dessert for your soul. Books are one of the few proven sources of mental exercise known to man. Reading is a workout for your mind. If your...

Fiction can do more than entertain you; it can change you

How in hell did those bombers get up there every single second of our lives! Why doesn’t someone want to talk about it! We’ve started and won two atomic wars since 2022! Is it because...

I’m a contemporary artist and I show in art galleries and museums. I show a number of photographs and films, but I also make television programs, books and some appetizing, all with the same concept.

The time spent rereading one book is one less new story I’ll be exposed to in my life.

Some books must be sipped slowly like a strong bourbon. Most books must be devoured more than once because as you age you distill more.

You’ll never find a cup of tea big enough or a book long enough to suit me.

when you are reading a book, and you know that it is going to be a tragedy; you can feel the cold and darkness coming, see the net drawing tight around the characters who live...

All souls can earn IMMORTALITY.The Creators have IMMORTALITY.The Creators are the’ ONLY’ ONES’To award IMMORTALITY…FROM MY BOOK: War between Souls over First Universe Justice Awaits

I don’t want to be remembered as a writer. I would rather be remembered as a storyteller.

The wise are above books.

Time. Either you are for it or against it. So be here now. Not later.

Books had taught me new ideas and had shown me ways of life that I would not have known about otherwise, and they offered a refuge when, like now, real life seemed too hard.

I spent the rest of the day in someone else’s story. The rare moments that I put the book down, my own pain returned in burning stabs.

And I came to understand, in a way I never had before, that books are truly the stuff of miracles. I even dared to dream that someday, somehow, I might surround myself with books from...

I learned to write by reading the kind of books I wished I’d written.

To know your way round a library is to master the whole of culture, i.e. the whole world.

A colleague once described political theorists as people who were obsessed with two dozen books; after half a century of grappling with Mill’s essay On Liberty, or Hobbes’s Leviathan, I have sometimes thought two dozen...

A life without books is a thirsty life, and one without poetry is…like a life without pictures.

Writing is perhaps the greatest of human inventions, binding together people who never knew each other, citizens of distant epochs. Books break the shackles of time. A book is proof that humans are capable of...

Books that have become classics – books that have had their day and now get more praise than perusal – always remind me of retired colonels and majors and captains who, having reached the age...

Reciprocal marketing, promotions and links. In public good experiments, behavioral economists have demonstrated that the potential for reciprocal actions by players increases the rate of contribution to the public good, providing evidence for the importance...

All people, even secular people, are seeing books on the market like The End of History.

What is it, Master Calligrapher, that little girls do in the way that spiders weave?” sleeve asked primly.The Calligrapher coughed, for his room was very dusty, and there was dust even on his eyelashes, and...

Every time you publish a book, be prepared to eat a fresh slice of humble pie.

We may be sure that the characteristic blindness of the twentieth century – the blindness about which posterity will ask, “But how could they have thought that?” – lies where we have never suspected it…...

The taste for books was an early one. As a child he was sometimes found at midnight by a page still reading. They took his taper away, and he bred glow-worms to serve his purpose....

What we call life is only talk of nature.

Materializations are often best produced in rooms where there are books. I cannot think of any time when materialization was in any way hampered by the presence of books.