I had always turned to books, to knowledge, to help me get through everything in my life—and,sometimes, to escape it. But grief was a journey through a forest of razor blades. I walked through everypainful...

But at night, when the library lamps are lit, the outside world disappears and nothing but the space of books remains in existence.

Social networking is about building people up in your network NOT tearing them down

Before this generation lose the wisdom, one advice – read books.

There are books that speak to us of our own lives with a clarity we cannot match. They prevent the morose suspicion that we do not fully belong to the species, that we lie beyond...

It was like walking into a treasure trove of books, hoarded by pirate librarians.

I can think of few better ways to introduce a child to books than to let her stack them, upend them, rearrange them, and get her fingerprints all over them.

The House Was Quiet and the World Was CalmThe house was quiet and the world was calm. The reader became the book; and summer night Was like the conscious being of the book. The house...

Even though it doesn’t look like it, I run. On a treadmill. And I bounce around to all the songs on my iPod – the Pixies, Wagner, Richard and Linda Thompson, even books on tape....

All my books are about one major idea and two or three subsidiary ones. I have thought a lot about music when constructing books, and I like the way in music that themes come back.

Only the very weak-minded refuse to be influenced by literature and poetry.

He said that the principal function of music was to organize the details into harmonies that were intended to make us forget that there was randomness all around us. The same, he said, could be...

Books are like oxygen to a deep-sea diver,” she had once said. “Take them away and you might as well begin counting the bubbles.

Books are road map to your destination called success. Refer to good ones.

You know there’s got to be a better way of life – somewhere, sometime, somehow – but you’re not exactly sure what better is.

In tiefen, kalten, hohlen Räumen,Wo Schatten sich mit Schatten paaren,Wo alte Bücher Träume träumen,Von Zeiten, als sie Bäume waren,Wo Kohle Diamant gebiert,Man weder Licht noch Gnade kennt,Dort ist’s, wo jener Geist regiert,Den man den Schattenkönig...

I could read the great books but the great books don’t interest me.

Perhaps the perusal of such works may, without injustice, be compared with the use of opiates, baneful, when habitually and constantly resorted to, but of most blessed power in those moments of pain and of...

People read books to escape the uncertainties of life.

The visitor enters and says, “What a lot of books! Have you read them all?” …The best answer is the one always used by Roberto Leydi: “And more, dear sir, many more,” which freezes the...

Books to the people!

That which others hear or read of, I felt and practised myself; they get their knowledge by books, I mine by melancholizing.

A book is made from a tree. It is an assemblage of flat, flexible parts (still called “leaves”) imprinted with dark pigmented squiggles. One glance at it and you hear the voice of another person,...

Books let us into their souls and lay open to us the secrets of our own.”[The Sick Chamber (The New Monthly Magazine , August 1830)]

That’s the problem with fiction — or the charm, if you want. Even mediocre plots have a way of sinking their hooks into you, until you find yourself concerned for the fates of characters who...

As you read a book word by word and page by page, you participate in its creation, just as a cellist playing a Bach suite participates, note by note, in the creation, the coming-to-be, the...

I lose it when I can’t write. I feel sad and confused and fucked off.

There’s a hunger for stories in all of us, adults too. We need stories so much that we’re even willing to read bad books to get them, if the good books won’t supply them.

You can never get a cup of tea large enough or a book long enough to suit me.

Fiction is like a spider’s web, attached ever so lightly perhaps, but still attached to life at all four corners.

Serious affairs and history are carefully laid snares for the uninformed.

You know that frustrating feeling of losing the page in your book? You didn’t want to go too far ahead and spoil the surprise, and you didn’t want to go too far back, so you...

Accidents are not accidents but precise arrivals at the wrong right time.

There are as many different kinds of books as there are writers – as many different responses as there are readers.

Christ did not ask or want to be what he was not.

Here in the realm of books she’s self-assured. She has some of the control she doesn’t have anywhere else.

How does one say something new and not retell?

She’d always been a little excitable, a little more passionate about books than your average person, but she was supposed to be — she was a librarian, after all.

It would be inappropiate, undignified, at 38, to conduct friendships or love affairs with the ardour or intensity of a 22 year old. Falling in love like that? Writing poetry? Crying at pop songs? Dragging...

Well, the man who first translated the bible into English was burned at the stake, and they’ve been at it ever since. Must be all that adultery, murder and incest. But not to worry. It’s...

The only way to make a library safe is to lock people out of it. As long as they are allowed to read the books ‘any old time they have a mind to,’ libraries will...

A great book should leave you with many experiences, and slightly exhausted at the end. You live several lives while reading.

What is wonderful about great literature is that it transforms the man who reads it towards the condition of the man who wrote.

The only important thing in a book is the meaning that it has for you.

So many books, so little time.

Stories, like conjuring tricks, are invented because history is inadequate for our dreams.

… And the only way to find that honesty is to not overthink it.For your writing to come alive–to be multi-dimensional–you must barter away some control.

I think it’s the books that you read when you’re young that live with you forever.

I’m a great reader that never has time to read.

I try to write the kind of books I like to read.