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.

… la alegría infantil de sumergirse en una conversación inesperada con un completo desconocido para descubrirse, horas después -y bajo toneladas hipercalóricas de “,leíste a tal?”. “¡Sí! ,Y leíste a tal?”. “¡Sí! ,Y leíste a...

I am a passionate reader.New interested books keep adding on my reading list. My wildest dream is to complete reading all the books.

I see words, I read them.

Peter held up the book he had been reading: ‘Moby-Dick; or, The Whale’.”To tell you the truth, I’m not even sure this is English,” Peter said. “It’s taken me most of today to get through...

Only reading can leave one satisfied at having lived a thousand lives!

I won’t stay inwith married menany moresaid the wise girlthey’re too agreeable,it’s a little too muchlike curlingupwith the good book.You meanagood bookOh, dear,did I saythegood booksighed the witch.

Reading a book is something you do to yourself.

Yes, I read. And yes, I do it a lot. And yes, I did it before you because life can suck and living in a fantasy world is a lot more fun than living in...

If I had my way no one should be taught to read until after he had passed his hundredth year. In that way, and in that way only can we protect our youth from the...

Through our reading we can travel to other times and other places, into other peoples minds and hearts and souls: it is a transcendent experience.

I am beginning to be sorry that I ever undertook to write this book. Not that it bores me; I have nothing else to do; indeed, it is a welcome distraction from eternity. But the...

Reading every day keeps the brain dead sickness away.

All I wanted to do was go back inside to the library and read a book.I used to spend all my time reading books, or watching television. It was safe. Nobody ever was hurt or...

When something needs to be fixed, when I need something to change, my first and abiding instinct is to read. I think I can read my way to a solution. Or at least an evasion.

I haven’t any right to criticize books, and I don’t do it except when I hate them. I often want to criticize Jane Austen, but her books madden me so that I can’t conceal my...

We have no time to waste on insignificant books, hollow books, books that are there to please…We want books that cost their authors a great deal, books where you can feel the years of work,...

We don’t need to have just one favorite. We keep adding favorites. Our favorite book is always the book that speaks most directly to us at a particular stage in our lives. And our lives...

To become a ‘good reader’ one must give oneself over to a regime of concentrated pleasure. One does not set out to read a book a day (there is no necessary pleasure in that) but...

Fiction allows us to slide into these other heads, these other places, and look out through other eyes. And then in the tale we stop before we die, or we die vicariously and unharmed, and...

They will need you to put the right books in their hands, book in which they can lose themselves and books in which they can find themselves.

I read for pleasure and that is the moment I learn the most.

Why do all your friends talk like books?

At some point in reading, we realize we have to read not just the books that we’d enjoy, but the books that move us, touch us, those that break us and hurt us, those which...

There are worse crimes than burning books. One of them is not reading them.

You can’t just be reading books all the time and leave the writting of them to others.

As long as no more than a small minority are capable of reading and writing, universal alphabetization seems like a messianic project. Only once everyone has this ability does one notice the catastrophe that almost...

There were two sets of double doors leading out of the antechamber, one marked STACKS and the other TOMES. Not knowing the difference between the two, I headed to the ones labeled STACKS. That was...

The greatest book is not the one whose message engraves itself on the brain, as a telegraphic message engraves itself on the ticker-tape, but the one whose vital impact opens up other viewpoints, and from...

Literature takes us away from our grey everyday experience, but brings us back enriched with new sensibilities.

I read the writings of great men and women so that I can think bigger thoughts.

To hell with you. To hell with you and to hell with the Internet.

[T]he only luxury he allows himself is buying books, paperback books, mostly novels, American novels, British novels, foreign novels in translation, but in the end books are not luxuries so much as necessities, and reading...

You, my reader, who see me close, wonder about my heartbeats and measure my words, you my close friend who know my eyes and the home of their prose, you, my only lover, who always...

Read a lot. But read as a writer, to see how other writers are doing it. And make your knowledge of literature in English as deep and broad as you can. In workshops, writers are...

I cannot remember the books I’ve read any more than the meals I have eaten; even so, they have made me.

Perhaps reading and writing books is one of the last defences human dignity has left, because in the end they remind us of what God once reminded us before He too evaporated in this age...

No encounter occured that day, and I was glad of it; I took out of my pocket a little Homer I had not opened since leaving Marseilles, reread three lines of the Odyssey, learned them...