The strength of fiction is not in reading about yourself, but in reading about other people.

The dull people decided years and years ago, as everyone knows, that novel-writing was the lowest species of literary exertion, and that novel reading was a dangerous luxury and an utter waste of time.

Books are in the mind, Grandfather Alessandro said. Too many books and you forget your body is in the world.

Reading is an addiction that I adore.

Colleges should offer lots of optional life-enriching experiences, like intramural basketball and a place to sunbathe. But reading books, like basketball or sunbathing, is a leisure activity, neither more nor less admirable than any other, and colleges should not pretend otherwise.

It’s a rare book that wins the battle against drooping eyelids.

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.

Rob turned the rustling pages and grinned.’Ach, she’s writ here: “Oh, the dear Feegles ha’ turned up again,”‘ he said. This met with general applause.’Ach, what a kind girl she is tae write that,’ said Billy Bigchin. ‘Can I see?’He read: “Oh dear, the Feegles have turned up again.”‘Ah,’ he said.

Escapism isn’t good or bad of itself. What is important is what you are escaping from and where you are escaping to. I write from experience, since in my case I escaped to the idea that books could be really enjoyable, an aspect of reading that teachers had not hitherto suggested.

How many books are there?” said Masklin.”Hundreds! Thousands!””Do you know what they’re all about?”Gurder looked at him blankly. “Do you know what you’re saying?” he said.”No. But I want to find out.””They’re about everything! You’d never believe it! They’re full of words even I don’t understand!””Can you find a book which tells you how to...

Books were her refuge. Having set herself to learn the Russian language, she read every Russian book she could find. But French was the language she preferred, and she read French books indiscriminately, picking up whatever her ladies-in-waiting happened to be reading. She always kept a book in her room and carried another in her...

I wish to deal only with the masterpieces which the consensus of opinion for a long time has accepted as supreme. We are all supposed to have read them; it is a pity that so few of us have.

When you are old and gray and full of sleep And nodding by the fire, take down this book, And slowly read, and dream of the soft look Your eyes had once, and of their shadows deep.

When it comes to literature, we are all groping in the dark, even the writer. Especially the writer. And that is a good thing–maybe one of the best things about literature. It’s always an adventure of some kind.

Part of the pleasure has to do with a sense of efficiency, of materials exactly allocated and completely used. Another part has to do with a sense of inevitability, the feeling that someone knew where we were headed all along, even if we and the characters did not.

My mother used to read to me every night when I was little. We got through most of the major fantasy books of that time. The Narnia books by C.S. Lewis were my favorites and, later, Tolkien’s The Lord of the Rings. I started making dolls to fill in the gaps of the dolls I...

Books: open them. Your mind is calling for new horizons of knowledge and wonders.

At any rate, during the few hours when the depressive state itself eased off long enough to permit the luxury of concentration, I had recently filled this vacuum with fairly extensive reading and I had absorbed many fascinating and troubling facts

Everyone should read, we say, but we act as if only those with special talent should write.

To be a devout reader was to be an acolyte of solace.

Reading nurtures the soul, and an enlightened friend brings it solace.

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

Whenever you read a good book, somewhere in the world a door opens to allow in more light.

He always thinks because I’m reading, I’m not doing anything. There is no greater plague to an introvert than the extroverted.

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, if not to have read the same books, to have read at least some books in common with the other...

do not exist,” or in any case do not exist in the same way as do the inhabitants of the real world. But things manifest in an entirely different way on the unconscious level, which is interested not in the ontological differences between worlds but in the effect they produce on the psyche.Every psychoanalyst knows...

More people should visit Antarctica, metaphorically speaking, on their own. That is one of the conclusions I have reached, one of my recommendations: explore something, even if it’s just a bookshelf. Make a stab in the dark. Read off the beaten path. Your attention is precious. Be careful of other people trying to direct how...

She is a great gobbler of books, but reads only trash, memorizing nothing and leaving out the longer descriptions.

I read a lot. I always have, but in those two years I gorged myself on books with a voluptuous, almost erotic gluttony. I would go to the local library and take out as many as I could, and then lock myself in the bedsit and read solidly for a week. I went for old...

Curiously enough, one cannot read a book: one can only reread it. A good reader, a major reader, an active and creative reader is a rereader. And I shall tell you why. When we read a book for the first time the very process of laboriously moving our eyes from left to right, line after...

To be a well-favoured man is the gift of fortune; but to write and read comes by nature.

Currently, the Library of Congress houses eighteen million books. American publishers add another two hundred thousand titles to this stack each year. This means that at the current publishing rate, ten million new books will be added in the next fifty years. Add together the dusty LOC volumes with the shiny new and forthcoming books,...

Just write. That’s my only tip. And read. I guess that’s two.

To me, reading through old letters and journals is like treasure hunting. Somewhere in those faded, handwritten lines there is a story that has been packed away in a dusty old box for years.

We have more choice than ever before about where and how we buy and read books.

She curled sideways into the milky light of the bedside lamp and began to read.

Reading is dreaming. Reading is entering a world of imagination shared between reader and author. Reading is getting beyond the words to the story or meaning underneath.

Never give up. Dare to Dream. Dare to believe.

We read to know we’re not alone.

To write is to carve a new path through the terrain of the imagination, or to point out new features on a familiar route. To read is to travel through that terrain with the author as a guide– a guide one might not always agree with or trust, but who can at least be counted...

Maybe some people were destined to be alone. But, I reminded myself, you’re never alone if you read.

Reading is the Feeding that your mind has been Needing,

I was always going to the bookcase for another sip of the divine specific.

The taste for books was an early one. As a child he was sometimes found at midnight by a page still reading. They took his taper away, and he bred glow-worms to serve his purpose. They took the glow-worms away and he almost burnt the house down with a tinder.

Fiction is like a spider’s web, attached ever so lightly perhaps, but still attached to life at all four corners.

What’s your favorite book?’ is a question that is usually only asked by children and banking identity-verification services–and favorite isn’t, anyway, the right word to describe the relationship a reader has with a particularly cherished book. Most serious readers can point to one book that has a place in their life like the one that...

And somehow or other, the windows being open, and the book held so that it rested upon a background of escallonia hedges and distant blue, instead of being a book it seemed as if what I read was laid upon the landscape not printed, bound, or sewn up, but somehow the product of trees and...

I ransack public libraries, and find them full of sunk treasure.

Sometimes he spent hours together in the great libraries of Paris, those catacombs of departed authors, rummaging among their hoards of dusty and obsolete works in quest of food for his unhealthy appetite. He was, in a manner, a literary ghoul, feeding in the charnel-house of decayed literature.

Border crossing’ is a recurrent theme in all aspects of my work — editing, writing, and painting. I’m interested in the various ways artists not only cross borders but also subvert them. In mythology, the old Trickster figure Coyote is a champion border crosser, mischievously dashing from the land of the living to the land...