In some Old Testament books, it’s very evident that an editor has been at work. That’s quite all right. It’s part of the process.

Happiness is not always reading the same page in the same book. Sometimes it is just wanting to hold the others book for them to read.

Your friends are a reflection of you.

I enjoyed writing. Perhaps it was because I hardly heard the sound of my own voice. My written words were my voice, speaking, singing, … I was there on the page

I’ll read my books and I’ll drink coffee and I’ll listen to music, and I’ll bolt the door.”( A Boy in France: Saturday Evening Post CCXVII, March 31, 1945)

Liest man, was alle anderen auch lesen, kann man auch nur das denken, was alle anderen denken.

She became his Ariadne, leading him through the labyrinth of books, stopping now and then to pass another one to him.

Sometimes, you read a book and it fills you with this weird evangelical zeal, and you become convinced that the shattered world will never be put back together unless and until all living humans read...

Words dazzle and deceive because they are mimed by the face. But black words on a white page are the soul laid bare.

Well yeah, but now I’m highly motivated to get you out.” This is what I love about novels, both reading them and writing them. They jump into the abyss to be with you where you...

I am a machine condemned to devour books.

We’re all entitled to our different likes and dislikes. Imagine the world if we all liked the same things.

Writing sometimes feels frivolous and sometimes sacred, but memory is one of my strongest muses. I serve her with my words. So long as people read, those we love survive however evanescently. As do we...

Never trust anyone who has not brought a book with them.

Self learner; reading.

I love digging myself into books because the moment I’m drifted from reality, I’m in a different world and I’m a different person.

I read the fuck out of every book I can get my hands on.

Anna read and understood, but it was unpleasant to read, that is to say, to follow the reflection of other people’s lives. She was too eager to live herself.

I wasn’t a normal professor. I had worked in government. I hadn’t written nine zillion books. I was a hands-on professor.

Learning to decipher words had only added to the pleasures of holding spines and turning pages, measuring the journey to the end with a thumb-riffle, poring over frontispieces. Books! Opening with a crackle of old...

Money is the most important thing in the world, you know. Money can buy you happiness, and I don’t care what anyone else thinks.

The bailout of Fannie Mae is completely off the books. It’s going to cost us hundreds of billions of dollars. Yet nobody is placing this in any type of column in accounting for federal debt.

transformed” her into a cheerleader by the end of the show. I was just wondering: what if she liked field hockey better?

Learning new things exercises the brain in such a titillating way.

… a writer concocts a different story for every reader.

There was nothing particularly special about her, except that she was good with numbers, and very good at lying, and she made her home in between the pages of books.

Yo, que me figuraba el Paraíso bajo la especie de una biblioteca.

Young minds – young brains – need stories and ideas like the ones in those [censored and banned] books in order to grow. They need ideas that you disagree with. They need ideas that I...

I don’t want to write about real things, I would rather write about an uncontrollable parasitic twin.

What I saw next stopped me dead in my tracks. Books. Not just one or two dozen, but hundreds of them. In crates. In piles on the floor. In bookcases that stretched from floor to...

One of the poets, whose name I cannot recall, has a passage, which I am unable at the moment to remember, in one of his works, which for the time being has slipped my mind,...

The irritating question they ask us — us being writers — is: “Where do you get your ideas?”And the answer is: Confluence. Things come together. The right ingredients and suddenly: Abracadabra!

A room without books is like a body without a soul.

Books themselves need no defense. Their spokesmen come and go, their readers live and die, they remain constant.

Winning the Pulitzer is wonderful and it’s an honor and I feel so humbled and so grateful, but I think that I’ll think of it very much as the final sort of final moment for...

I was always reading books when I should have been doing math and the rest of it.

I have been known to buy e-versions of my books because I was in a hotel room and I needed one right away to look up something in it; very handy for that – you...

Temeraire said, ‘It is very nice how many books there are, indeed. And on so many subjects!

Books allowed my imagination to take flight and it hasn’t landed yet

Few pleasures, for the true reader, rival the pleasure of browsing unhurriedly among books: old books, new books, library books, other people’s books, one’s own books – it does not matter whose or where. Simply...

In modeling: He with better looks is more in demand than he who has read better books.

Wer sieben gute Bücher hat, braucht keine Menschen mehr.

Nobody can decide for himself whether he is going to be a human being. The only question open to him is whether he will be an ignorant undeveloped one or one who has sought to...

It is a great thing to start life with a small number of really good books which are your very own.

I guess there’s a sort of cycle with writing books. There’s all the researching and then the imagining and writing – which is the real job – and then there’s always a period when the...

She found herself longing for home-not just for the hotel but for New York and all the real novels that she could lose herself in there.

A good response beats a bad reaction any day. Be encouraged

I have no feelings of guilt regarding the books I have not read and perhaps will never read; I know that my books have unlimited patience. They will wait for me till the end of...

I just got out of the hospital. I was in a speed reading accident. I hit a book mark and flew across the room.

We have to teach empathy as we do literacy.