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.

You recreate your world to your taste with God’s Word in your mouth.

A woman can tolerate delays knowing they are not denials; she is diligent, and composed. She is not easily irritated like love; she endures all things, beans all things and can be stretched to any...

But the main reason you should read this is that I don’t see why I should have to know all these terrible, terrible things and you should get off scot free.

She never managed to find herself in these books no matter how hard she tried, exhuming traits from between the pages and donning them for an hour, a day, a week. We think in some...

You can read until you’re blue in the face, but I’d recommend writing until you’re red in the face. And ass.

Reading is going toward something that is about to be, and no one yet knows what it will be.

Robert was the owner and the Executive Director for 99 Red Balloons Japan Inc and entertainment and event company that provided entertainers decorations for promotions, special events, advertising, and for English language instruction at primary...

Read deeply, not to believe, not to accept, not to contradict, but to learn to share in that one nature that writes and reads.

My niece just turned one. I gave her a birthday card that read, “If you can read this, Happy Birthday!

It has been found that reading love quotes is beneficial to your health. It has been found by me, and I found it under my bed.

Until I feared I would lose it, I never loved to read. One does not love breathing.

The process of reading is somehow heightened through the process of doing it near water. Extreme reading!

I would look at the first chapter of any new novel as a final test of its merits. If there was a murdered man under the sofa in the first chapter, I read the story....

Books help me create a better reality.

I enjoyed writing. Perhaps it was because I hardly heard the sound of my own voice. My written words were my voice, speaking, singing, … I was there on the page

A classroom atmosphere that promotes reading does not come from the furniture and its placement as much as it comes from the teacher’s expectation that students will read.

I should like to write about what happens when fictive people encounter and are embellished by real people.

Motionless we traverse countries we fancy we see, and your thought, blending with the fiction, playing with the details, follows the outline of the adventures. It mingles with the characters, and it seems as if...

Well, I usually can’t, but neither the book nor the conversation is particularly intellectually challenging.