The odd thing about people who had many books was how they always wanted more.

For my success I am immensely grateful to God, my parents, my family, my friends, my teachers and to the books I read.

No, no, it’s not the books you are looking for! Take it where you can find it, in old phonograph records, in old motion pictures, and in old friends; look for it in nature and...

Books make me happy, boys make me sad.

I hate it when everyone is so noble and good in a story that you can’t imagine it being true at all.

The attraction of reading is that it allows you to live, for a few hours, as someone else—grants you access to their head, their thoughts, their secrets.

Fairy tales are rife with transformation — from beast to handsome prince, from dirty scullery maid to well-dressed princess. It is perhaps no coincidence that nature in the Cinderella stories facilitates transformation, for nature itself...

Will: I’ve never seen anyone get so excited over books before. You’d think they were diamonds.Tessa: Well, they are, aren’t they? Isn’t there anything you love like that?

The reason why so few good books are written is that so few people who can write know anything.

Literature cannot be imposed; it must be discovered.

Write all the time. I believe in writing every day, at least a thousand words a day. We have a strange idea about writing: that it can be done, and done well, without a great...

Be the greatest of who you were meant to be. Life goes on ferociously-with or without you. It is your choice. Truly and magnificently your choice.

Finishing a good book is like leaving a good friend

Slow down. Make a point of revisiting passages that seem especially rich, or especially confusing, or for that matter especially offensive.

Victory must be real. It must be earned. That means it must be rare and difficult, against steep odds, and defeat must be the other.

…I set the house on fire. It’s dark outside. The fire tears down the darkness. I turn my back to the place and leave, not knowing where. And suddenly I understand…All dreams are dead now”.

A writer who has perfect writing skills and zero honesty is not an author but a sales person.

Being ill when you are a child or growing up is such an enchanted interlude! The outside world, the world of free time in the yard or the garden or on the street, is only...

Books are the perfect entertainment: no commercials, no batteries,hours of enjoyment for each dollar spent.

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…