As children we read to escape—to enter fantasy worlds where a bespectacled boy can discover he’s a wizard or a brave girl can find a magical passage through a wardrobe. But we also read to...

Lovers of print are simply confusing the plate for the food.

My personal theory is that younger audiences disdain books – not because those readers are dumber than past readers, but because today’s reader is smarter.

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.

Amanda took the torn page from Maniac. To her, it was the broken wing of a bird, a pet out in the rain.

The best morals kids get from any book is just the capacity to empathize with other people, to care about the characters and their feelings. So you don’t have to write a preachy book to...

For it was through books that she felt her life to be unjudged Look at all of the great mix-ups, messes, confinement, and double-dealings in Shakespeare, she thought.Identities disguised continually, in a combative dance of...

I find things hidden in books: dried flowers, locks of hair, tickets, labels, receipt, invoices, photographs, postcards, all manner of cards. I find letters, unpublished works by the ordinary, the anguished, the illiterate. Clumsily written...

I wait all year for the colder seasons, just so that when I wear my Hogwarts scarf it’s functional as well as fashionable.

As long as reading is for us the instigator whose magic keys have opened the door to those dwelling-places deep within us that we would not have known how to enter, its role in our...

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...