Reading a book is a silent conversation between two friends.

I didn’t mind what she called me, what anybody called me. But this was the room I had to live in. It was all I had in the way of a home. In it was...

Each spine was an encapsulated memory, each book represented hours, days of pleasure, of immersion into words.

The Chinese considered the moon to be yin, feminine and full of negative energy, as opposed to the sun that was yang and exemplified masculinity. I liked the moon, with its soft silver beams. It...

A half-read book is a half-finished love affair.

I love so many books and authors that it’s hard to name just a few, but I’m always particularly excited when new books by Alice Hoffman, John Crowley, Joanne Harris, Elizabeth Knox, and Patricia McKillip...

It would actually constitute more than a miracle, he realised. It would take divine intervention plus luck, plus some unknown element of cosmic wizardry.

If you have a dream, don’t just sit there. Gather courage to believe that you can succeed and leave no stone unturned to make it a reality.

As I walked in the dark through the tunnels and tunnels of books, I could not help being overcome by a sense of sadness. I couldn’t help thinking that if I, by pure chance. had...

Second hand books are wild books, homeless books; they have come together in vast flocks of variegated feather, and have a charm which the domesticated volumes of the library lack.

Forget decorated generals, tell me about Private Ryan.

I love the place; the magnificent books; I require books as I require air.

If you could have walked on the planet before humans lived here, maybe the Ivory Coast would have seemed more beautiful than La Côte d’Azur.

Hard to remember these days that there was a time you had to wait for the ink and paper reviews to see your work excoriated. With the invention of the internet, any subliterate cretin can...

My childhood was surrounded by books and writing. From a very early age I was fascinated by storytelling, by the printed word, by language, by ideas. So I would seek them out.

In this course I have tried to reveal the mechanism of those wonderful toys — literary masterpieces. I have tried to make of you good readers who read books not for the infantile purpose of...

Literature has the ability to open up a whole new world to children, but we need to have a share in helping them to find that door and open it with them. Let’s set the...

The books we love offer a sketch of a whole universe that we secretly inhabit, and in which we desire the other person to assume a role.One of the conditions of happy romantic compatibility is,...

Living in a bookshop is like living in a warehouse of explosives. Those shelves are ranked with the most furious combustibles in the world–the brains of men.

The slight, the facile and the merely self-glorifying tend to drop away over the centuries, and what we are left with is the bedrock: Homer and Milton, the Greek tragedian and Shakespeare, Chaucer and Cervantes...

My grandparents used to bring me books every time they saw me.

There are many horrible sights in the multiverse. Somehow, though, to a soul attuned to the subtle rhythms of a library, there are few worse sights than a hole where a book ought to be.

There’s nothing wrong with reading a book you love over and over. When you do, the words get inside you, become a part of you, in a way that words in a book you’ve read...

penilosophy.

Books have their idiosyncrasies as well as people, and will not show me their full beauties unless the place and time in which they are read suits them.

Censorship ends in logical completeness when nobody is allowed to read any books except the books that nobody can read.”[As quoted in Literary Censorship in England (in Current Opinion, Vol. 55, No. 5, November 1913)]

Every time you open a book for the first time, there is something akin to safe-breaking about it. Yes, that’s exactly it: the frantic reader is like a burglar who has spent hours digging a...

Give a man a hoe and he is something to exploit. Give him a book and he is something to fear.

Think before you speak. Read before you think.

I’m a book lover. I’ve probably already fucked a whole library.

Words and a book and a belief that the world is words…

No book is really worth reading, which does not either impart valuable knowledge; or set before us some ideal of beauty, strength, or nobility of character. There are enough great books to occupy us during...

I think that every reader on earth has a list of cherished books as unique as their fingerprints….I think that, as you age, you tend to gravitate towards the classics, but those aren’t the books...

Friends are like books, you learn from every one of them.

Do you ever hide books you’ve read over and over again because you’re so sick of them?”Oh, definitely. When they ask for them, I say the book fairy came to get it. One time they...

I don’t like to travel. Yet all my books seem to involve a journey.

Sometimes I’ll read a book and feel it was written just for me. Then I’ll flip the book over to look at the cover to see who wrote it, only to discover that it feels...

Look at your daughter,’ she whispered. ‘As brave as…as..” She wanted to compare Meggie to a hero in some story but all the heroes she could think of were men, and anyway none of them...

Of all the comforting objects in this world, few things are as reassuring and accepting as books.

Every work cancels the dark. Every work is a hymn from the other side of memory to a memory that is spellbound. Beauty is death’s gift to vulgar life so that it can live in...

Me and my readers, we’re on the same page. That page is one.

Books; I repeat, for they’ve not only been a solace during the long years but also provided the keys to understanding other people’s ideas and achievements, their hopes and fears, quirks and foibles, their dreams…..their...

I’d experienced the ’40s and ’50s by looking at my grandparents’ old clothes, books, and magazines.

Like flies in amber, like corpses frozen in ice, that which according to the laws of nature should pass away is, by the miracle of ink on paper, preserved. It is a kind of magic....

I went through and underlined all the funny lines in his book, and by the time I was done, I had underlined his whole book. That would be great if he wrote a humor book,...

And that’s the most horrible thing about censorship: To avoid falling afoul of the censors, we question ourselves and censor ourselves and make a big deal out of things in our heads. We do the...

Luckily, I always travel with a book, just in case I have to wait on line for Santa, or some such inconvenience.

Vengeful conquerors burn books as if the enemy’s souls reside there, too.

Yet if women are so flighty, fickle, changeable, susceptible, and inconstant (as some clerks would have us believe), why is it that their suitors have to resort to such trickery to have their way with...

Adieu, mon cher vieux. Relis et rebûche ton conte. Laisse-le reposer et reprends-le, les livres ne se font pas comme les enfants, mais comme les pyramides, avec un dessin prémédité, et en apportant des grands...