A book is like a pump. It gives nothing unless first you give to it. You prime a pump with your own water, you work the handle with your own strength. You do this because...

…we have, each of us, a story that is uniquely ours, a narrative arc that we can walk with purpose once we figure out what it is. It’s the opposite to living our lives episodically,...

In a book, all would have gone according to plan… but life was so fucking untidy — what could you say for an existence where some of the most crucial conversations of your life took...

I have all the books I could need, and what more could I need than books?

Imagination is what you do with your inspiration.

Sometimes the things in our heads are far worse than anything they could put in books or on film!!

Years ago, when I was about to go on a book tour for Someplace to Be Flying, my editor at the time Terri Windling and I sat down to figure out what to call what...

It is often much harder to get rid of books than to acquire them. They stick to us in that pact of need and oblivion we make with them, witnesses to a moment in our...

We haven’t remained idle, twiddling our thumbs while you were off having a good time. Through books Cathy and I have lived a zillion lives . . . our vicarious way to feel alive.

This place is a mystery. A sanctuary. Every book, every volume you see, has a soul. The soul of the person who wrote it & the soul of those who read it & lived it...

I have no fear of men, as such, nor of their books. I have mixed with them–one or two of them particularly– almost as one of their own sex. I mean I have not felt...

I can hear the library humming in the night, a choir of authors murmuring inside their books along the unlit, alphabetical shelves, Giovanni Pontano next to Pope, Dumas next to his son, each one stitched...

And books — she swallows like dumplings.

Your head is a lit chamber.

Some things can be fixed. Some things are just too broken.

One piece of wisdom a writer quickly learns ~ typos keep you humble.

We are absurdly accustomed to the miracle of a few written signs being able to contain immortal imagery, involutions of thought, new worlds with live people, speaking, weeping, laughing. We take it for granted so...

Anyone can take an adventure even if it’s only in your own backyard. Let your imagination be your adventure and see where it takes you.

To speak without shame about books we haven’t read, we would thus do well to free ourselves of the oppressive image of cultural literacy without gaps, as transmitted and imposed by family and school, for...

There is no one so grateful as the man to whom you have given just the book his soul needed and he never knew it. – Roger Mifflin

Reading literature is a way of reaching back to something bigger and older and different. It can give you the feeling that you belong to the past as well as the present, and it can...

There is much you can learn from books and scrolls. These books are my friends, my companions. They make me laugh and cry and find meaning in life.

Several times he had to flatten himself against the shelves as a thesaurus thundered by. He waited patiently as a herd of Critters crawled past, grazing on the contents of the choicer books and leaving...

I would not sacrifice a single living mesquite tree for any book ever written. One square mile of living desert is worth a hundred ‘great books’ – and one brave deed is worth a thousand.

Having had virtually no contact with the outside world for the last few weeks, Evan had temporarily forgotten the social norms governing shopping conduct or approaching celebrities in public.

The brown and charred rags that hung from the sides of it, I presently recognized as the decaying vestiges of books. They had long since dropped to pieces, and every semblance of print had left...

A book must be the axe for the frozen sea within us.

All summer, I read fiction because you must read for the pleasure and beauty of it, and not only for research. I don’t read thrillers, romance or mystery, and I don’t read self-help books because...

The great thing about books was the solidity of the written word. You might change and your reading might change as a result, but the book remained whatever it had always been. A good book...

– Io non potrò mai darti quel genere di sensazioni, mi dispiace.– Ed io non le voglio … perché ho capito che è facile innamorarsi di un mito. Chi non s’innamorerebbe di un attore bello...

Visitors might notice that Jacksonville has lots of trees. And there would be more trees, if I didn’t go around chopping so many down, in anticipation of my upcoming paper company. (I plan on self-publishing...

I cordially dislike allegory in all its manifestations, and always have done so since I grew old and wary enough to detect its presence. I much prefer history – true or feigned– with its varied...

Reading Chekhov, I felt not happy, exactly, but as close to happiness as I knew I was likely to come. And it occurred to me that this was the pleasure and mystery of reading, as...

It is because of this sea between us. The earth has never, up to now, separated us. But, ever since yesterday, there has been something in this nonetheless real, perfectly Atlantic, salty, slightly rough sea...

Well-wrought poems and works of imaginative literature can do for us what stone-cold prose can never do. They can help us grasp the full dimension of ways of life other than our own.

I stubbed my toe just as someone dropped a book into the inside drop box. As I yelped and howled in pain, a child on the other side said, ‘Mommy, I think we hurt the...

I am never really surprised at the way my books take shape. They are just not as perfect as I’d like them to be.

All thoughts, secret or spoken, belong in a coffee table book written in Braille, so you can really feel the emotions.

Sections in the bookstore- Books You Haven’t Read- Books You Needn’t Read- Books Made for Purposes Other Than Reading- Books Read Even Before You Open Them Since They Belong to the Category of Books Read...

Books keep and reciprocate our secrets, dreams, regrets, and hopes better than any friend in the world.

That’s a compliment for anyone who knows the freedom and clarity of losing their mind,” he reaffirmed her.

Reading is entering into the consciousness of another human being.

Ida Says ‘I do’ in Idaho.” It would be about a divorce in Washington State, and the protagonist would be a woman, though I’m not sure what her name should be.

When Suzie introduced Helen, she told the audience that one of the best things about books is that they are an interactive art form: that while the author may describe in some detail how a...

The books of C.S. Lewis had a very profound, indirect effect on me.

But one learns from books and reels only that certain things can be done. Actual learning requires that you do those things.

Sometimes God’s way of answering prayer is not by removing the pressure, but by increasing your strength to bear it.

From the moment I picked up your book until I put it down, I was convulsed with laughter. Some day I intend reading it.

God bless ladies with costly, tasteful clothes and touching, dirty fingernails that champion gifted, foreign poets and decorate the library in beautiful, melancholy fashion! My God, this universe is nothing to snicker at!

Don’t forget, and don’t let your reader forget, that the small world in which you have held him for the last hour or two hasn’t ended. Be aware, and make him aware, that tomorrow all...