Books were once cherished belongings of people, that they weren’t always just neglected and collecting dust.

There are magic moments, involving great physical fatigue and intense motor excitement, that produce visions of people known in the past (“en me retraçant ces détails, j’en suis à me demander s’ils sont réels, ou...

magic” of friendship, art, community, and social activism. Although most of his books have not been published specifically for adolescents and young adults, nonetheless young readers find them and embrace them with particular passion. I’ve...

There are books for when you’re bored. Plenty of them. There are books for when you’re calm. The best kind, in my opinion. There are also books for when you’re sad. And there are books...

Reading a book is like re-writing it for yourself. You bring to a novel, anything you read, all your experience of the world. You bring your history and you read it in your own terms.

Not that length and weight alone indicate excellence; many epic tales are pretty much epic crap.

Everyone and Everything is conspiring to end up in a book.

My books are friends that never fail me.”(Letter to his mother, Margaret A. Carlyle; 17 March 1817)

I am a practical girl, and a life is only so long. It should be spent in as much peace and good eating and good reading as possible and no undue excitement. That is all...

When you look at what C.S. Lewis is saying, his message is so anti-life, so cruel, so unjust. The view that the Narnia books have for the material world is one of almost undisguised contempt....

Wait till the power grids start failing in the 2030s and the datavats get erased. It’s not far away. The future looks a lot like the past.

Forty-three years old, and the war occurred half a lifetime ago, and yet the remembering makes it now. And sometimes remembering will lead to a story, which makes it forever. That’s what stories are for....

Hope without love is hopeless.

What we have in life that we can count on is who we are and where we come from, she thought absently. For better or worse, that is what we have to sustain us in...

MarginaliaSometimes the notes are ferocious,skirmishes against the authorraging along the borders of every pagein tiny black script.If I could just get my hands on you,Kierkegaard, or Conor Cruise O’Brien,they seem to say,I would bolt the...

And the upside to being confined to home was that it gave me plenty of time to continue reading.

We measure everything by ourselves with almost a necessary conceit.

To the one who views from a larger perspective….everything is a blessing.

He did not waste time in a vain search for a place in history.

The young need discipline and a full bookcase.

The show must go on, and so must The Book.

I’m not trying to please anyone. I’m just trying to write a damn book.

I am Envy…I cannot read and therefore wish all books burned.

Despite the enormous quantity of books, how few people read! And if one reads profitably, one would realize how much stupid stuff the vulgar herd is content to swallow every day.

When you adapt to someone, they become a part of your routine, a part of you. And when they’re taken away, you feel a bit lost. No matter how much you think it won’t affect...

To acquire the habit of reading is to construct for yourself a refuge from almost all the miseries of life.

What we need now are heroes and heroines, about a million of them, one brave deed is worth a thousand books. Sentiment without action is the ruin of the soul.

Bill Gates (and his successor at Microsoft, Ray Ozzie) are famous for taking annual reading vacations. During the year they deliberately cultivate a stack of reading material—much of it unrelated to their day-to-day focus at...

Inside the front flap of the book were handwritten names of the dozen or so people who had checked the book out before Naomi. Instead of writing her name, Naomi had a thin paper receipt...

I never actually had a guitar lesson. I taught myself the guitar from piano exercise books, which led me to have a pretty good technique on the guitar and allowed me to find different ways...

There has always been, for me, this other world, this second world to fall back on–a more reliable world in so far as it does not hide that its premise is illusion.

It was understood that they shared the same thresholds–the same inexhaustible appetite for wasting time, for discussing lofty ideas, for dissecting trivial things, for driving to nowhere in particular, for listening to music, for talking...

All good and true book-lovers practice the pleasing and improving avocation of reading in bed … No book can be appreciated until it has been slept with and dreamed over.

Humans like stories. Humans need stories. Stories are good. Stories work. Story clarifies and captures the essence of the human spirit. Story, in all its forms—of life, of love, of knowledge—has traced the upward surge...

She did not care very much for other little girls, but if she had plenty of books she could console herself.

…there is a saying used in twelve-step programs and in most treatment centers that “Relapse is part of recovery.” It’s another dangerous slogan that is based on a myth, and it only gives people permission...

I wouldn’t get nearly as many books written if I lived in New York. The Columbia Gorge is fantastic. When the sun shines, I just want to be outdoors.

My books are all fantastically sentimental.

People say that a picture is worth a thousand words, but sometimes a mighty quotation is worth more than a thousand pictures.

The function of a book is to provide a reading experience.

I’ll make you fitter to talk with men,I’ll touch with silver the lines you pen,I’ll lead you nearer the truth you seek,I’ll strengthen you when your faith grows weak -This place on your shelf is...

It did occur to me that certainly African-Americans are not underserved in picture books, but those books are almost all about specifically black experiences.

There are certain books in the history of the world that should never have been written. This book makes all those look like masterpieces.

Who wants a library full of books you’ve already read?

It is not all books that are as dull as their readers. There are probably words addressed to our condition exactly, which, if we could really hear and understand, would be more salutary than the...

This is my logo for Art and Books

If you ask me for a book to read, I’ll hand you a soda can. Start there.

The written word is all that stands between memory and oblivion. Without books as our anchors, we are cast adrift, neither teaching nor learning. They are windows on the past, mirrors on the present, and...

A novel is just a story that hasn’t yet discovered a way to be brief.

All morning I struggled with the sensation of stray wisps of one world seeping through the cracks of another. Do you know the feeling when you start reading a new book before the membrane of...