For six months, then, Emma, at fifteen years of age, made her hands dirty with books from old lending libraries.

Books—they weren’t ladders out of the abyss, but they were companions.

The glamour’s off. Almost any question you ask can be answered. It’s only the questions that you didn’t know to ask that remain, dancing the can-can behind your back. The unknown unknowns.

People in books were always so charming, and all their thoughts and actions so comprehensible. They all invariably had a clear, well-defined object in life, and strove through a few hundred engrossing pages to attain...

An English writer telephoned me from London, asking questions. One was, ‘What’s your alma mater?’ I told him, ‘Books.

Reading yourself as a fiction as well as a fact is the only way to keep the narrative open – the only way to stop the story from running away under its own momentum, often...

It is untrue that fiction is nonutilitarian. The uses of fiction are synonymous with the uses of literature. They include refreshment, clarification of life, self-awareness, expansion of our range of experiences, and enlargement of our...

The library turned out to be a very pleasant place, but it was not the comfortable chairs, the huge wooden bookshelves, or the hush of people reading that made the three siblings feel so good...

I like shelves full of books in a library, but if all books become electronic, the task of big research libraries remains the same – keep what’s published in the form in which it appeared.

My wish is to create a huge library of books.

It…whatever ‘it’ is, has swallowed me and I lie here in the pit of its cold dark stomach being eaten alive by its bile and I…I don’t even know if I want to be saved.

….a good book can teach you about the world and about yourself. You learn more than how to read better; you also learn more about life. You become wiser. Not just more knowledgeable – books...

Reading is a time machine that allows you to acquire wisdom from the past and to analyze and imagine another person’s vision of the future.

The beauty of fantasy is that it allows the protagonist to pass through fear to come to know this different reality and to find a place in it.

Novels arise out of the shortcomings of history.

…and Jo laid the rustling sheets together with a careful hand, as one might shut the covers of a lovely romance, which holds the reader fast till the end comes, and he finds himself alone...

Just aiming a speely input device, or a Farspark chambre, or whatever you call it… a speelycaptor… at something doesn’t collect what is meaningful to me. I need someone to gather it in with all...

Over the years I have collected so many books that, in aggregate, they can fairly be called a library.I don’t know what percentage of them I have read. Increasingly I wonder how many of them...

When I started this book last year, I had a small reception in mind. A few copies in my hand to share with close friends, maybe a small gathering… I never imagined that my book...

J. Alfred Prufrock measured his life out in coffee spoons. I measure mine out in pages.

This must be what an addict feels like, I think, trying to fight the pull of one last, quick read. My fingers itch toward the binding, and finally, with a sigh of regret, I just...

Once I had opened a book and read its pages, those characters could never be taken away from me. Even if the books were burned, they would still live on in my mind.

And on the subject of burning books: I want to congratulate librarians, not famous for their physical strength or their powerful political connections or their great wealth, who, all over this country, have staunchly resisted...

You are what you eat and read.

People talk about books being an escape, but here on the tube, this one feels more like a lifeline…The motion of the train makes her head rattle, but her eyes lock on the words the...

Censorship is the child of fear and the father of ignorance.

For books are not absolutely dead things, but do contain a potency of life in them to be as active as that soul was whose progeny they are; nay, they do preserve as in a...

If you have a garden and a library, you have everything you need.

I’m a big believer in big books, and that doesn’t necessarily mean long books.

A book is a magical thing that lets you travel to far-away places without ever leaving your chair.

I’d volunteer to go to prison, as long as there are books. Because with books I am free.

La lecture de tous les bons livres est comme une conversation avec les plus honnêtes gens des siècles passés.

Reading alters the appearance of a book. Once it has been read, it never looks the same again, and people leave their individual imprint on a book they have read. Once of the pleasures of...

Some of the best advice my aunt gave me was if you want to find out more about something you read.

Escribir como forma de vida o de muerte, depende de la trama.

The worst feature of the Common Core is its anti-humanistic, utilitarian approach to education. It mistakes what a child is and what a human being is for. That is why it has no use for...

Well Ice H20 is my company that I plan to take to the next level with new artists, books, movies and so forth. It’s more like a multimedia brand that I want to take to...

The paper is my savior, the pen my blood, to words that shed my world.

History proves that most writers get forgotten anyway. That’s very likely to happen to my books, and if I’m extremely lucky, maybe one of my books will survive.

Literature illuminates life only for those to whom books are a necessity.

I settle into my imagination so that I might be someone when the real world tells me I’m no one.

‘You’re there, but the books draw you in to whole other worlds. I mean, I know you study more serious things than the silly stories I read, but when you’re there, you can be anywhere....

He wondered if burned books made a special kind of smoke that clung to the world forever, in the same way that a book, once read, clings to its reader forever.

We read to under­stand our intu­ition of the world, to dis­cover that some­one a thou­sand miles and years away has put into words our most inti­mate desires and our most secret fears. Reading is a...

Do we take less pride in the possession of our home because its walls were built by some unknown carpenter, its tapestries woven by some unknown weaver on a far Oriental shore, in some antique...

His eyes move to my lips, and I know he’s thinking the same thing; I can feel it in the way the air charges between us. I can almost taste him half an inch away,...

To live fully your well-read life -at any age- it is essential to take your selection of books seriously. When you drift from book to book, you’re lulled into thinking that this lack of focus...

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.