How can you be nervous? Don’t you see? We’re in a library.

I consume an enormous number of books, but they’re always on a particular subject because I’m obsessive.

An artist is someone who can hold two opposing viewpoints and still remain fully functional.

I demand from a book harmony as unity and moderation; that determines the choice of words, the type and number of metaphors, the development and conclusion

I hope you enjoy reading my book as much as I didn’t enjoy writing it. Just kidding! I hope you don’t enjoy it at all.

In the shop window you have promptly identified the cover with the title you were looking for. Following this visual trail, you have forced your way through the shop past the thick barricade of Books...

Literature is humanity’s broad-minded alter-ego, with room in its heart for monsters, even for you. It’s humanity without the judgement.

You see, unlike in the movies, there is no THE END sign flashing at the end of books. When I’ve read a book, I don’t feel like I’ve finished anything. So I start a new...

Naked Lunch” that day, but the cafeteria served us all clothing. I like my meals a little more scandalous. I should eat in the library, along with the other gluttonous nudists.

The act of underlining always contains an element of self-recognition.

You could never be certain what you would find in a book that had spent time with someone else.

But there is in everything a reasonable division of labour. I have written the book, and nothing on earth would induce me to read it.

Of course. You get everything from books.

The books that influence the world are those that it has not read.

Where is human nature so weak as in the bookstore?

Heaven is a warm cat and a good book.

Desire overwhelmed me once she had gone. But it was not a desire for Homer. I had to return to the library. I could already smell the books’ muskiness and in my mind turned over...

No, read in order to live.

The biggest spur to my interest in art came when I played van Gogh in the biographical film Lust For Life. The role affected me deeply. I was haunted by this talented genius who took...

To have come on all this new world of writing, with time to read in a city like Paris where there was a way of living well and working, no matter how poor you were,...

I think I learned a lot from reading in general – even from reading badly written books.

Discovery a good book is like finding a great treasure.

It took me a long time to come out as someone who doesn’t like film. It’s a bit like when people say they don’t like books: you get that sharp intake of breath.

Literature is impossible, in exactly this sense: every new generation has so much ‘catching up’ to do that the real choice that presents itself soon is the following one: one either spends ones entire life...

The Bible is the greatest book ever written.

No one forces me, or any other writer, to sell a film option on the books. If you don’t want to run the risk that the filmmakers may adapt your work in a way you...

Those who spend the greater part of their time in reading or writing books are, of course, apt to take rather particular notice of accumulations of books when they come across them. They will not...

I don’t have goals when writing books, apart from getting to the end. I have rather vague ideas about how I want things to feel, I’m big on ambience. I have a title, a beginning...

The complexities of adult life get in the way of the truth. The great philosophers have always been able to clear away the complexities and see simple distinctions – simple once they are stated, vastly...

Thank you for sending me a copy of your book. I’ll waste no time reading it.

These stories were very old, as old as people, and they had survived because they were very powerful indeed. They were the tales that echoed in the head long after the books that contained them...

Dialogue is the place that books are most alive and forge the most direct connection with readers. It is also where we as writers discover our characters and allow them to become real.

Someone was coming through the velvet.He was pulling it wide, he was stepping onto Kestrel’s balcony—close, closer still as she turned and the curtain swayed, then stopped. He pinned the velvet against frame. He held...

People wandered in for books and conversation. They brought their stories to her, some bound, and some known by heart. She recognized some of the stories as real, and some as fiction. But she honored...

I do, I’m afraid, understand books far more readily than I understand people. Books are so easy to get along with.

Books are the compasses and telescopes and sextants and charts which other men have prepared to help us navigate the dangerous seas of human life.

… it would even be inexact to say that I thought of those who read it as readers of my book. Because they were not, as I saw it, my readers. More exactly they were...

Et av mine yndlingssteder i palasset var det kjempestore biblioteket som inneholdt uvurderlige førsteutgaver skrevet av berømte forfattere verden over. Glasskapene der bøkene sto, var alltid låst, de var bare en imponerende prydgjenstand, enda en...

Chicken Soup for the Soul”. You’ve heard of these books, am I right? We’ve all heard of them. But I wonder if you’re aware of just how many “Chicken Soup” books exist on the planet....

We profit little by books we do not enjoy.

What is the use of a book without pictures or conversations?-Alice in Wonderland

If writers learn more from their books than do readers, perhaps I may have begun to learn.

To become a ‘good reader’ one must give oneself over to a regime of concentrated pleasure. One does not set out to read a book a day (there is no necessary pleasure in that) but...

Douglas has more books- and comic books- than anyone I know. Still, if you wanted to borrow one, and took it down off the shelf and forgot to mention it to him, Douglas would notice...

You never forget the books you loved as a kid. You never forget the poems you memorized, the first book you read until the cover fell off, the book you read hidden from your mother....

I do not believe that all books will or should migrate onto screens: as Douglas Adams once pointed out to me, more than 20 years before the Kindle showed up, a physical book is like...

The library was my only blessing. Every time I climbed the stairs, my heart lifted. All day, I looked forward to the happy hours I spent in that beautiful room. My guilt over appa’s fate...

He was the crazy one who had painted himself black and defeated the world.She was the book thief without the words.Trust me, though, the words were on their way, and when they arrived, Liesel would...

The reading of all good books is like conversation with the finest men of past centuries.

All photos speak a thousand words. This one contained a library.