Simple minded people do things like gossip, lie, spread rumors, and cause troubles. But, I know you’re more intelligent.

The only life worth living is the adventurous life. Of such a life the dominant characteristic is that it is unafraid. It is unafraid of what other people think…It does not adapt either its pace...

Books and movies, they are not mere entertainment. They sustain me and help me cope with my real life.

Associate with noblest people you can find; read the best books; live with the mighty. But learn to be happy alone. Rely upon your own energies, and so not wait for, or depend on other...

Right now, we’re living in an ugly chapter of our lives, but books always get better!

For writers, handing a manuscript off to an editor is like walking into a parole hearing. You’ve done the time but wonder if it’s going to satisfy the judge.

Every article and review and book that I have ever published has constituted an appeal to the person or persons to whom I should have talked before I dared to write it. I never launch...

What’s the use trying to read Shakespeare, especially in one of those little paper editions whose pages get ruffled, or stuck together with sea-water?

Cada vez que un libro cambia de manos, cada vez que alguien desliza la mirada por sus páginas, su espíritu crece y se hace fuerte. (Sempere)

Writers shouldn’t fear criticism. Instead, they should fear silence. Criticism is healthy. It gets people thinking about your work and, even better, it gets them talking and arguing. But as for silence — it is...

School did give me one of the greatest gifts of my life, though. I learned how to read, and for that I remain thankful. I would have died otherwise. As soon as I was able,...

Researching books gets you into nothing but trouble.

Wherever there is somebody else, a war is not far away.

The book smelled dusty and old but also carried a sweet tang, a hint of something inviting. She opened to the first page and started to read, pronouncing the words in a reverent whisper.

The Cemetery of Forgotten Books is a metaphor, not just for books but for ideas, for language, for knowledge, for beauty, for all the things that make us human, for collecting memory.

I read a lot. I always have, but in those two years I gorged myself on books with a voluptuous, almost erotic gluttony. I would go to the local library and take out as many...

When you find that one book, that one that makes you tingle. It’s almost like you found a little piece of magic.

Sometimes you only get one chance to rewrite the qualities of the character you played in a person’s life story. Always take it. Never let the world read the wrong version of you.

I think it will last,” said Grandfather. “In my experience when people once begin to read they go on. They begin because they think they ought to and they go on because they must. Yes....

I pull my foot back again, but Four’s hands clamp around my arms, and he pulls me away from her with irresistible force. I breathe through gritted teeth, staring at Molly’s blood-covered face, the color...

I suggest that the only books that influence us are those for which we are ready, and which have gone a little further down our particular path than we have yet gone ourselves.

What is literature but the expression of moods by the vehicle of symbol and incident? And are there not moods which need heaven, hell, purgatory, and faeryland for their expression, no less than this dilapidated...

I’ve never missed a flight. And I don’t see any reason in cutting it close because airports are pleasurable for me: You can go to the restaurant, get a massage, browse books, sit at a...

Dating someone exclusively for four months in New York is like four years in Anchorage.

Reading always calmed me down: filling my head with other – made up – people’s problems and conflicts made my own seem less terrible, less real.

I don’t believe in the kind of magic in my books. But I do believe something very magical can happen when you read a good book.

Perhaps a book becomes a classic in proportion to how broadly its characters can be scavenged, how many readers find within it something they experience as desirable or even intimately necessary.

But the book! The siren song of the book!

There was, in my view, an unwritten contract with the reader that the writer must honour. No single element of an imagined world or any of its characters should be allowed to dissolve on an...

Cakes are like books: There are new ones you want to read and old favorites you want to reread.

In a word, literature is my Utopia. Here I am not disfranchised. No barrier of the senses shuts me out from the sweet, gracious discourse of my book-friends. They talk to me without embarrassment or...

The act of writing is a way of tricking yourself into revealing something that you would never consciously put into the world. Sometimes I’m shocked by the deeply personal things I’ve put into books without...

In fiction, beauty was run-of-the-mill.

Ulysses,” by Joyce, because like my undergraduate college degree, that’s nine and a half years of my life I’ll never get back. If the book had been about 75 pages shorter, I might have finished...

Blíndur er bóklaus ma∂ur. Blind is a man without a book.

Americans think African writers will write about the exotic, about wildlife, poverty, maybe AIDS. They come to Africa and African books with certain expectations.

This book belongs to the most rare of men. Perhaps not one of them is yet alive. First the day after tomorrow must come for me. Some men are born posthumously.

Isn’t it odd how much fatter a book gets when you’ve read it several times?” Mo had said…”As if something were left between the pages every time you read it. Feelings, thoughts, sounds, smells…and then,...

Book: Ten Steps to Asexuality and Financial Freedom, by Lonely Path

Reading well is one of the great pleasures that solitude can afford you.

Sometimes when I read before bed I get so tired that my eyes gloss over the sentences without actually taking in any information, as my mind wanders in a pre dream state. That’s also how...

In Western Civilization, our elders are books.

I have never experienced a sorrow that was not relieved by an hour of reading.

As long as you have any floor space at all, you have room for books! Just make two stacks of books the same height, place them three or four feet apart, lay a board across...

I love ‘The Stand;’ I read it when I was a kid – it was one of my favorite books when I was growing up. I love Stephen King; I think he’s a remarkable writer.

There must always be a fringe of the experimental in literature–poems bizarre in form and curious in content, stories that overreach for what has not hitherto been put in story form, criticism that mingles a...

Outside of a dog, a book is man’s best friend. Inside of a dog it’s too dark to read.

Reading changes your life. Reading unlocks worlds unknown or forgotten, taking travelers around the world and through time. Reading helps you escape the confines of school and pursue your own education. Through characters – the...

I’m a very lazy person by nature. I have to be really engaged, and then I go straight from lazy to obsessive. I couldn’t study chemistry, but I could memorize all the books for Dungeons...

Books aren’t made in the way that babies are: they are made like pyramids, There’s some long-pondered plan, and then great blocks of stone are placed one on top of the other, and it’s back-breaking,...