Allowing yourself to stop reading a book – at page 25, 50, or even, less frequently, a few chapters from the end – is a rite of passage in a reader’s life, the literary equivalent...

Why do you think people stopped reading? We read to connect with other minds. But why read when you’re busy writing, describing the fine-grained flotsam of your own life. Compulsively recording every morsel you eat,...

All that is necessary for a student is access to a library.

Knowledge drifts in and out of my mind”, said Lestat with a little look of honest distress and a shake of his head. “I devour it and then I lose it and sometimes I can’t...

Literature, real literature, must not be gulped down like some potion which may be good for the heart or good for the brain — the brain, that stomach of the soul. Literature must be taken...

… reading was hardly as practical a skill as being able to handle a dagger or use Allomancy?

An honest bookstore would post the following sign above its ‘self-help’ section: ‘For true self-help, please visit our philosophy, literature, history and science sections, find yourself a good book, read it, and think about it.

Why are we reading, if not in hope of beauty laid bare, life heightened and its deepest mystery probed? Can the writer isolate and vivify all in experience that most deeply engages our intellects and...

The books and magazines streamed in. He could buy them all, they piled up around him and even while he read, the number of those still to be read disturbed him. … they stood in...

Come to the feast.”Whitechapel Library, Aldgate East.

We can learn to pay attention, concentrate, devote ourselves to authors. We can slow down so we can hear the voice of texts, feel the movement of sentences, experience the pleasure of words–and own passages...

A book is made from a tree. It is an assemblage of flat, flexible parts (still called “leaves”) imprinted with dark pigmented squiggles. One glance at it and you hear the voice of another person,...

That’s the problem with fiction — or the charm, if you want. Even mediocre plots have a way of sinking their hooks into you, until you find yourself concerned for the fates of characters who...

I could not give up either of these worlds, neither the book I am holding nor the gleaming forest, though I have told you almost nothing of what is said here on these grim pages,...

A person who reads lives more than one life, but that means that they die more than once as well.

And every writer cherishes the dream of setting the young on fire, even if only by a cigarette butt tossed casually over the shoulder, and when we meet young people who say that they were...

yet you cannot help but love them.

Why is any one book different from any other book? They are different, A.J. decides, because they are. We have to look inside many. We have to believe. We agree to be disappointed sometimes so...

He read it over twenty times and though the darkness that sang on held steady about him, the unhurried words fell bright through his mind, going down golden through deep water, and when one passed...

Mr Earbrass was virtually asleep when several lines of verse passed through his mind and left it hopelessly awake. Here was the perfect epigraph for TUH:A horrid ?monster has been [something] delay’dBy your/their indiff’rence in...

I wanted to read immediately. The only fear was that of books coming to an end.

It was spring when it happened and the schoolroom windows were open all day long, and every afternoon after Billy left we had milk from little waxy cartons and Mrs. Jansma would read us chapters...

I think, because I’ve been working for a while, I’ve been working since I was ten, I had the fortune of reading a lot, a lot of scripts.

It’s not what you lift, it’s where you carry it.

Reading is not as insignificant as we claim. First we must steal the key to the library. Reading is a provocation, a rebellion: we open the book’s door, pretending it is a simple paperback cover,...

Don’t let any situation intimidate you anymore, don’t accept defeat anymore.

I turned down the first script offered to me, and the second. I lay on my back one day under an umbrella, in the garden, reading the third, and wondered why I had turned down...

Before you sleep, read something that is exquisite, and worth remembering.

The church trembled and the hail hammered the roof, but his words glided in the air, joyful and bright like the birds at the cliffs. They floated freely around one another without colliding and the...

So you went from one reader to two readers?” you’d be absolutely correct. And after I had congratulated you on your keen guess, I’d thank you for being 50% of my reading base.

Look at your daughter,’ she whispered. ‘As brave as…as..” She wanted to compare Meggie to a hero in some story but all the heroes she could think of were men, and anyway none of them...

The best books… are those that tell you what you know already.

What’s the point of a houseful of books you’ve already read?

And if I’m guilty of having gratuitous sex, then I’m also guilty of having gratuitous violence, and gratuitous feasting, and gratuitous description of clothes, and gratuitous heraldry, because very little of this is necessary to...

Naked Lunch” that day, but the cafeteria served us all clothing. I like my meals a little more scandalous. I should eat in the library, along with the other gluttonous nudists.

Denn ich ohne Bücher bin nicht ich.

Readers are plentiful; thinkers are rare.

They were…no ordinary group, gathering together to kill an evening, to seek refuge from critical husbands and demanding children while idly discussing their new best-seller. They met because literature was their shared passion. Books were...

To feel most beautifully alive means to be reading something beautiful, ready always to apprehend in the flow of language the sudden flash of poetry.

… and because they were fond of reading, she fancied them satirical: perhaps without exactly knowing what it was to be satirical; but that did not signify. It was censure in common use, and easily...

While the consequences are often quite hellish, I am absolutely and perhaps permanently against ignoring books recommended from the heart by very nice people and strangers; it is too risky and inhuman; also the consequences...

If you read a story that really involves you, your body will tell you that you are living through the experience. You will recognize feelings that have physical signs – increased heart rate, sweaty palms,...

My Alma mater is the Chicago Public Library.

The poem or the discovery exists in two moments of vision: the moment of appreciation as much as that of creation; for the appreciator must see the movement, wake to the echo which was started...

I look forward all day to evening, and then I put an “engaged” on the door and get into my nice red bath robe and furry slippers and pile all the cushions behind me on...

The more a book is like an opium pipe, the more the Chinaman reader is satisfied with it and tends to discuss the quality of the drug rather than its lethargic effects.

I go on writing so that I will always have something to read.

My books are a word feast.

Books are my greatest treasure.

No matter who you are, no matter where you live, and no matter how many people are chasing you, what you don’t read is often as important as what you do read.