And for the next long years of my life, I tried to remember only the reading, not the terrible things that happened to me as I came and went up and down the stairs. The...

It is really hard to be lonely very long in a world of words. Even if you don’t have friends somewhere, you still have language, and it will find you and wrap its little syllables...

How about a man?” she retorts.

OK, publishing a book and releasing a movie is all very well, but Tottenham beating Man. U. 3-2… priceless.

No encounter occured that day, and I was glad of it; I took out of my pocket a little Homer I had not opened since leaving Marseilles, reread three lines of the Odyssey, learned them...

And if you are a parent, introduce your children to their neighborhood library. It will give them a real sense of independence to have their own library card and enjoy borrowing books.

It is a good rule after reading a new book, never to allow yourself another new one till you have read an old one in between.

Millions of pages cloaked in dust and inspiration and wisdom.

There is no scent so pleasant to my nostrils as that faint, subtle reek which comes from an ancient book.

A Million Copies Sold,” did you ever wonder who bought them?

When we read, we decide when, where, how long, and about what. One of the few places on earth that it is still possible to experience an instant sense of freedom and privacy is anywhere...

Just because you start attempting to do right, doesn’t mean people will let you forget about what you’ve done wrong…Be encouraged

From fire, water, the passage of time, neglectful readers, and the hand of the censor, each of my books has escaped to tell me its story.

There are good books which are only for adults.There are no good books which are only for children.

My breath catches, responding to an unfamiliar pull in my chest, an ache in my soul. I shouldn’t miss him, but I do; this boy who had every right to pull that trigger, and instead...

Everybody in the world ought to care for books, and if there are some who do not, why that is a perfectly convincing reason why books ought to be given to them, to be a...

There’s only about about 6 to 8 inches between an open book and a human being’s heart. A lot can happen in those 7 inches. Perspectives, fresh perspectives occur and minds expand, and I love...

…books were better than travel.

I have never been able to resist a book about books.

Shelving books incorrectly is as good as stealing them. It’s almost worse.

Jon Ronson makes me laugh. I’ve read all of his books.

If you cannot read all your books, at any rate handle, or as it were, fondle them – peer into them, let them fall open where they will, read from the first sentence that arrests...

I cannot explain love. I could not tell you if I loved you the first moment I saw you, or if it was the second or third or fourth. But I remember the first moment...

I read in self-defense.

And books, they offer one hope — that a whole universe might open up from between the covers, and falling into that universe, one is saved.

Not one-tenth of them. I don’t suppose you use your Sevres china every day?

Old is old at any age. Old is when you quit asking questions about this, that, and everything. Old is when you forget how to love-or worse, don’t care. Old is when you don’t want...

The books that help you the most are those which make you think the most.

All books are either dreams or swords,You can cut, or you can drug, with words.

You read a book for the story, for each of its words,” Gordy said, “and you draw your cartoons for the story, for each of the words and images. And, yeah, you need to take...

More books, more racing and more foolishness with cars and motorcycles are in the works.

We live for books.

Reading Gives Us Some Place To Go, When We Have To Stay Where We Are.

The contents of someone’s bookcase are part of his history, like an ancestral portrait.”(About Books; Recoiling, Rereading, Retelling, New York Times, February 22, 1987)

I profess to learn and to teach anatomy not from books but from dissections, not from the tenets of Philosophers but from the fabric of Nature.

I am drawn mostly, insistently to the human voice. How powerful and necessary the solo voice, the experience of being someone, something else for a little while. This is and will remain literature’s killer app,...

We read books to find out who we are. What other people, real or imaginary, do and think and feel… is an essential guide to our understanding of what we ourselves are and may become.

I inhaled the musty, leathery, old-papery scent and a shiver passed over me. If I had any idea of heaven, it was this: shelves and shelves of books, ten times as many as were upstairs,...

The act of true reading is in its very essence democratic. Consider the nature of what happens when we read a book – and I mean, of course, a work of literature, not an instruction...

One wants to tell a story, like Scheherezade, in order not to die. It’s one of the oldest urges in mankind. It’s a way of stalling death.

I asked her what a true story was because I thought that all stories were made up. She said a true story was called fact, and a made-up story was called ficton. Auntie May said...

Sound unbound by nature becomes bounded by art.

Some stories consumed you, they made time stop, your worries float into the ether, and when it came to my reading habits I chose romance over any other genre. The appeal of the happy ever...

It is time to float on the waters of the night. Time to wrap my arms around this book and press it to my chest, life preserver in a sea of unremarkable men and women,...

When you fail, embrace it. Bleed. Get hurt. Lose your religion. That’s the only way you will do amazing things.

The light teaches you to convert life into a festive promenade.

This is what drives a young writer out of his head, this feeling that nothing is being said.

As it unfolded, the structure of the story began to remind me of one of those Russian dolls that contain innumerable ever-smaller dolls within. Step by step the narrative split into a thousand stories, as...

Learning became her. She loved the smell of the book from the shelves, the type on the pages, the sense that the world was an infinite but knowable place. Every fact she learned seemed to...

Peter Pan has to be the book of my childhood. Come to think of it, it’s the book of my adulthood too. It’s a book which, in the reading of it, takes me back to...