Sometimes I sensed that the books I read in rapid succession had set up some sort of murmur among themselves, transforming my head into an orchestra pit where different musical instruments sounded out, and I...

The summer passed quietly. I busied myself as best I could, reading a good deal.

We’re all strangers connected by what we reveal, what we share, what we take away–our stories. I guess that’s what I love about books–they are thin strands of humanity that tether us to one another...

Oh for a book and a shady nook,Either indoors or out,with the green leaves whispering overhead,or the street cries all about.Where I may read at all my easeboth of the new and old,For a jolly...

Reading good books is like engaging in conversation with the most cultivated minds of past centuries who had composed them, or rather, taking part in a well-conducted dialogue in which such minds reveal to us...

To be a better cook, cook more. To be a better writer, read more.

A person who does not read cannot think. He may have good mental processes, but he has nothing to think about. You can feel for people or natural phenomena and react to them, but they...

I learned to dream through reading, learned to create dreams through writing, and learned to develop dreamers through teaching. I shall always be a dreamer.

When a person reaches the end of a book and says, ‘I want to read that again,’ what he’s actually saying is that he wants to mentally merge with his favorite character and stroll among...

It seemed any young woman at odds with her place in life–be she a genteel lady or a serving girl–might find a happier home within the pages of a book.

Belikov is a sick, evil man who should be thrown into a pit of rabid vipers for the great offense he commited against you this morning.””Thank you.” I said primly. Then, I considered. “Can vipers...

I wear glasses, and maybe you do, too. Mine probably cost about the same as yours. Would you trade lenses with me just because I asked you to? Of course not!That would be silly because...

Le Vrai lecteur écrit le livre en le lisant.

A good story is a dream shared by the author and the reader. Anything that wakes the reader from the dream is a mortal sin.

You’ll get younger not from what you read but from what you apply in your life. (192)

How the excitement comes upon me to tell it all! In the quest of writing, the heart can speed up with anticipation–as it does, indeed, during the chase itself of whales. I can swear it,...

Lest soviel ihr könnt! Lest Straßenschilder und Speisekarten, lest die Anschläge im Bürgermeisteramt, lest von mir aus Schundliteratur – aber lest! Lest! Sonst seid ihr verloren!

I feel free and strong. If I were not a reader of books I could not feel this way. Whatever may happen to me, thank God that I can read, that I have truly touched...

In my contact with people, I find that, as a rule, it is only the little, narrow people who live for themselves, who never read good books, who do not travel, who never open up...

Show me the books he loves and I shall know the man far better than through mortal friends.

Books to the ceiling,Books to the sky,My pile of books is a mile high.How I love them! How I need them!I’ll have a long beard by the time I read them.

Sounds okay,” I said and I kind of closed my eyes.

In the only sense that matters the surprise works as well the twentieth time as the first. It is the quality of unexpectedness, not the fact that delights us. It is even better the second...

Read. Read. Read. Just don’t read one type of book. Read different books by various authors so that you develop different style.

In my defense, I love the book in a postmodern kind of way where I’ve always sensed that it contains something that I relate to. I think it’s the kind of book that echoes my...

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

Readers are bullied in schoolyards and in locker-rooms as much as in government offices and prisons.

In the midst of the vagaries of life, they provide us a trip to the land of goodness and fairies, of imaginations and possibilities.A childhood that wasn’t spent watching cartoons or reading comic strips, no...

Like so many of the other books I read, it never seemed to me like a book, but like a place I had lived in, had visited and would visit again, just as all the...

There’s a hunger for stories in all of us, adults too. We need stories so much that we’re even willing to read bad books to get them, if the good books won’t supply them.

Give at least fifteen minutes everyday to reading. Sometimes, we spend a lot of time watching television – surfing through channels; not really watching anything in particular. Fifteen minutes out of that time is not...

I am the kind of writer that people think other people are reading.

Every fairy tale offers the potential to surpass present limits, so in a sense the fairy tale offers you freedoms that reality denies. In all great works of fiction, regardless of the grim reality they...

We read to know we are not alone.

This earth that we live on is full of stories in the same way that, for a fish, the ocean is full of ocean. Some people say when we are born we’re born into stories....

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.

Only the very weak-minded refuse to be influenced by literature and poetry.

I had plenty of pimples as a kid. One day I fell asleep in the library. When I woke up, a blind man was reading my face.

The things you read will fashion you by slowly conditioning your mind.

A book series is never truly over. The story lives on, even when the final page has been turned.

But what I hope for in a book – either one that I write or one that I read – is transparency. I want the story to shine through. I don’t want to think of...

Flow is something the reader experiences, not the writer.

Novels and gardens,” she says. “I like to move from plot to plot.

Insensibly he formed the most delightful habit in the world, the habit of reading: he did not know that thus he was providing himself with a refuge from all the distress of life; he did...

Through books I discovered everything to be loved, explored, visited, communed with. I was enriched and given all the blueprints to a marvelous life, I was consoled in adversity, I was prepared for both joys...

Bill Gates (and his successor at Microsoft, Ray Ozzie) are famous for taking annual reading vacations. During the year they deliberately cultivate a stack of reading material—much of it unrelated to their day-to-day focus at...

Reading a book is a silent conversation between two friends.

It is well known that reading quickens the growth of a heart like nothing else.

Un libro leído a medias es una aventura amorosa incompleta.

the day women are allowed to learn to read and write the world will become ungovernable.