he’ll expect to find us exactly where he left us, never mind how much his life has changed in the meantime.

I don’t know where everything is going, but I’m pretty confident that people like books – the objects. So I’m going to go on that -they’re not going to disappear.

Aziraphale collected books. If he were totally honest with himself he would have to have admitted that his bookshop was simply somewhere to store them. He was not unusual in this. In order to maintain...

Lügen schmerzen, die Wahrheit jedoch bewegt uns.

There comes a time in every man’s life when his thoughts lightly turn to setting his library on fire. To burn away the jungle to let him find the books that most matter to him.

Majina ya vitabu yanapaswa kuchaguliwa kwa mantiki na kwa makini ya hali ya juu mno, kwa sababu ni miongoni mwa vitu vya kwanza watu wanavyoviona na kuvisoma. Watu wakivutiwa na jina la kitabu, au mwandishi;...

Let me begin with a heartfelt confession.I admit it. I am a biblioholic, one who loves books and whose life would seem incomplete without them. I am an addict, with a compulsive need to stop...

When I’m really into a novel, I’m seeing the world differently during that time— not just for the hour or so in the day when I get to read. I’m actually walking around in a...

Ahhh. Bed, book, kitten, sandwich. All one needed in life, really.

it is nice that nobody writes as they talk and that the printed language is different from the spoken otherwise you could not lose yourself in books and of course you do you completely do.

Manuscript editions didn’t immediately die out with the printing explosion that burst across Europe in the 1460s and 1470s. Manuscripts continued to be produced into the 16th century, many decades after presses had spread to...

Not being the sort to throw a book, she pounded her fist on her cushion.

People who believe they have bad luck create bad luck. Those who believe they are very fortunate, that the world is a generous place filled with trustworthy people, live in exactly that kind of world.

What an author doesn’t know could fill a book.

I do things like get in a taxi and say, “The library, and step on it.

People listening to songs are like people reading novels: for a few minutes, for a few hours, someone else gets to come in and hijack that part of your brain that’s always thinking. A good...

Someone ought to publish a book about the doomsayers who keep publishing books about the end of publishing.

Books have a unique way of stopping time in a particular moment and saying: Let’s not forget this.

It seems to me that not only the writing in most children’s books condescends to kids, but so does the art. I don’t want to do that.

This book has nothing to do with cats. Or mice. Or self-motivation. This book is 100% 50% finished. But don’t worry, I finished the good half. But don’t be mistaken—the good half isn’t good at...

Reading is going toward something that is about to be, and no one yet knows what it will be.

When you lose yourself in a book the hours grow wings and fly.

I’m not one of those pious types who spend their whole lives hunched on prayer rugs while their eyes and hearts remain closed to the outside world. They read the Qur’an only on the surface....

The novel was set in an unspecified near future, because setting a novel in the present in a time of unprecedented technological and social dislocation seemed to me shortsighted…. To write a book set in...

There is no Frigate like a Book To take us Lands awayNor any Coursers like a Page Of prancing Poetry – This Traverse may the poorest takeWithout oppress of Toll – How frugal is the...

I would rather read a mediocre book than waste time sitting around with people making small talk.

The worn soles of Daffy’s boots skidded on the icy stones. He’d been saving up for a new pair for Christmas, but then he’d come across an encyclopaedia in ten volumes, going cheap. Boots might...

I think books are like people, in the sense that they’ll turn up in your life when you most need them.

And books! …she would buy them all over and over again; she would buy up every copy, I believe, to prevent their falling into unworthy hands; and she would have every book that tells her...

Even a book can be dangerous in the wrong hands, and when that happens, you blame the hands, but you also read the book.

Did you ever hear anyone say, ‘That work had better be banned because I might read it and it might be very damaging to me’?

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.

What a writer brought to a book didn’t matter as much as what the reader contributed.

I guess there are never enough books.

Thus, in a real sense, I am constantly writing autobiography,but I have to turn it into fiction in order to give it credibility.

Women’s fiction is just a marketing category, designed to appeal more to women than to men. But there are stories in that category that any human being would like.

I try not to worry about rewriting books that worked well the first time. I’m too busy writing new books to worry about things that are already in print.