If there’s a book you really want to read but it hasn’t been written yet, then you must write it.- Toni Morrison

Sorry, he said penitently. It’s a book. I have no common sense around them.

I shall remain on Mars and read a book.

if a book isn’t self-explanatory, then it isn’t worth reading.

I was maybe 19 years old. And I always remember that it was a great feeling of happiness. Because of that, I said to Myles that it’s no different for me if I am read­ing...

Even for studies, where expenditure is most honorable, it is justifiable only so long as it is kept within bounds. What is the use of having countless books and libraries, whose titles their owners can...

A man’s bookcase will tell you everything you’ll ever need to know about him.

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Where books had been a comfort before, they became a necessity, old books best of all: thick heavy tomes with stories that spread and twisted through other worlds, where he could walk like a ghost...

Experience life, pick up a good book and appreciate the moment, for the moment, not the replay.

This is what reading is like to me. It’s finding a spring in the midst of a barren land. Just when I think I might up and die of thirst, I stumble onto this fresh,...

You get to know someone better not when they talk about themselves, but when they talk about others

I read to be alone. I read so as not to be alone.

I am always chilled and astonished by the would-be writers who ask me for advice and admit, quite blithely, that they “don’t have time to read.” This is like a guy starting up Mount Everest...

If on the other hand we found even one reader to whom the cheap little book with its double columns and the lurid daub on its cover had been a lifelong delight, who had read...

That’s the curse of the reading class. We can be seduced by a good story even at the most inopportune moments.

There is a line of poetry, a sentence in a fable, a word in an essay, by which my existence is justified; find that line, and immortality is assured.

What we become depends on what we read after all of the professors have finished with us. The greatest university of all is a collection of books.

We have to teach empathy as we do literacy.

I’ve learned to let my characters speak and act the way they want to! I’ve tried to interfere but they just get angry at me and throw big rocks.

To look at the paper is to raise a seashell to one’s ear and to be overwhelmed by the roar of humanity.

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. Besides, in this random miscellaneous company...

Had I been able to formulate my first impressions of the United States, I might have said that there was a place in America called Kansas, where people could find a magic land at the...

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

Reading Shakespeare is sometimes like looking through a window into a dark room. You don’t see in. You see nothing but a reflection of yourself unable to see in. An unflattering image of yourself blind.

To stop us reading forbidden books they will have to burn every manuscript. But to stop us thinking forbidden thoughts they will have to cut off our heads.

That perfect tranquility of life, which is nowhere to be found but in retreat, a faithful friend and a good library.

Nobody ever gave away a trophy for reading books

It would be so great to have someone my own age to talk to, even if it was just about books.

If you cannot find yourself on the page very early in life, you will go looking for yourself in all the wrong places.

He passed his hands over some of the fine embossed bindings as he thought, I am a book also, words and thoughts and stories held together by flesh. We open and close ourselves to the...

When a goat likes a book, the whole book is gone,and the meaning has to go find an author again.- The Trouble With Reading

Be curious. Read widely. Try new things. What people call intelligence just boils down to curiosity.

I read anything that’s going to be interesting. But you don’t know what it is until you’ve read it. Somewhere in a book on the history of false teeth there’ll be the making of a...

Nothing can compare to the feeling evoked by turning the page in a great book.

Now, 75 years [after To Kill a Mockingbird], in an abundant society where people have laptops, cell phones, iPods, and minds like empty rooms, I still plod along with books.[Open Letter, O Magazine, July 2006]

A book is indeed dead until a reader brings it into life by reading it.

So much of what we read nowadays is there one moment and gone the next. When you read something good, cherish it.

Books act like a developing fluid on film. That is, they bring into consciousness what you didn’t know you knew.

School did give me one of the greatest gifts of my life, though. I learned how to read, and for that I remain thankful. I would have died otherwise. As soon as I was able,...

Sometimes the best books are hidden gems that you didn’t even know were out there!

Stranger, pause and look;From the dust of agesLift this little book,Turn the tattered pages,Read me, do not let me die!Search the fading letters findingSteadfast in the broken bindingAll that once was I!

The use, not the reading, of books makes us wise.

It’s not macho to read? Nonsense. Reading is a stouthearted activity, disporting courage, keenness, stick-to-itness. It is also, in my experience, one of the most thrilling and enduring delights of life, equal to a home...

If you don’t like to read, you haven’t found the right book.

Perhaps a book becomes a classic in proportion to how broadly its characters can be scavenged, how many readers find within it something they experience as desirable or even intimately necessary.

This poetry is utilitarian—heavy-duty, industrial strength poetry. It is meant to be read aloud and, even better, memorized and recited. It is best used in the natural world where there are starlit skies, the warmth...

Owning a book is a third of the goal. The others are actually reading it and applying it.

Books are the bees which carry the quickening pollen from one to another mind.

You are reading me; over the boundary of time and distance, I am touching you, not with my hands but with my love.