I write to get ideas out of my head

Your favorite occupation? Travel in contested territory. Hard-working writing and reading when safely home, in the knowledge that an amusing friend is later coming to dinner.

A library should fill our leisure with adventure. It is a refuge from the commonplace and the dull, a sanctuary where all the trials, the tribulations, and the boredoms of the outer world are forbidden...

The books my mother read and reread provided a broader, more adventurous world, and escape from the confines of her chronic illness. Her interior life was enriched even as her physical life contracted. If she...

So this blessing of loneliness was not really loneliness. Real loneliness was something unendurable. What one wanted when exhausted by the noise and impact of physical bodies was not no people but disembodied people; all...

I have no particular plan in life – and that’s something I rather like. Most things that people do seem to me to be rather dull and silly. In my ideal life I’d be left...

The hero was the sort of character you could feel yourself falling in love with, no matter how much you tried to convince yourself that he wasn’t real

The most important thing is to read as much as you can, like I did. It will give you an understanding of what makes good writing and it will enlarge your vocabulary.

Every time you open a book for the first time, there is something akin to safe-breaking about it. Yes, that’s exactly it: the frantic reader is like a burglar who has spent hours digging a...

Don’t you understand Tink? You mean more to me than anything in this whole world!

Childhood is not all candy stores and recess; it’s frustrations and confusions, too.

A country whose citizens do not read is already late because “reading” is just the first step to wisdom acquisition. Application of the learnt knowledge is the gateway to personal transformation. If you don’t read,...

I know every book of mine by its smell, and I have but to put my nosebetween the pages to be reminded of all sorts of things.

We cannot prevail by our own might or strength, we need to plug on to the source of our strength so that we will remain resourceful always.

When I read about the evils of drinking, I gave up reading.

As an actor, you’re pretty much a hired gun. You are reading other people’s words off of a page and doing what they want you to do.

As you grow ready for it, somewhere or other you will find what is needful for you in a book.

You’re never too old, too wacky, too wild, to pick up a book and read to a child.

No se asombre de verme siempre vagando con los ojos. En realidad este es mi modo de leer, y solo así la lectura me resulta fructífera. Si un libro me interesa realmente, no logro seguirlo...

She was a great and insatiable reader, surprisingly well acquainted with the classics of literature, and unexpectedly lavish in the purchase of books. Her neighbours never forgot to mention, in describing her, the awe-inspiring fact...

Children are made readers on the laps of their parents.

Reading is difficult. People just aren’t meant to read anymore. We’re in a post-literate age. You know, a visual age. How many years after the fall of Rome did it take for a Dante to...

The only book I’d read in the shower is Naked Lunch, because my bathtub is in the center of my kitchen. I make breakfast like I make love, and sometimes I’m so hungry I make...

Sloveso číst nestrpí rozkazovací způsob. Tuto nechuť sdílí s několika dalšími: se slovesem “milovat”… nebo například “snít”…

Still in my coat and hat, I sank onto the stair to read the letter. (I never read without making sure I am in a secure position. I have been like this ever since the...

Don’t join the book burners. Don’t think you’re going to conceal faults by concealing evidence that they ever existed. Don’t be afraid to go in your library and read every book…

A fondness for reading, properly directed, must be an education in itself.

A book can open the mind, free the heart, and speak to the soul.

You can never read too much into anything

The more you read, the better you get, the more better you get, the more you like it; and the more you like it, the more you do it.

Halfway across town, Father Tibor Kasparian lay on the long hard cement cot that was what this jail cell had for a bed and wished he had a book. It could be any book. He...

there exist a great parity between things inside books and things outside books. What are inside books, are not all that different from what are outside books

How are we to spend our lives, anyway? That is the real question. We read to seek the answer, and the search itself–the task of a lifetime–becomes the answer.

I am a machine condemned to devour books.

I was only good at one thing: words. I had read more, much more, than anybody else, and I knew how words worked in the way that some boys knew how engines worked.

Literature is impossible, in exactly this sense: every new generation has so much ‘catching up’ to do that the real choice that presents itself soon is the following one: one either spends ones entire life...

How can a man know how to live rightly on the face of earth? By daily reading and meditation on the Holy Scriptures and obedience to what is written.

Life is too short to waste your time with bad books.

It’s not good…Reading and eating at the same time. The stomach needs blood for digestion. When you read, the brain steals the blood. – Fausto

by reading book after book (the only reliable otherworlds I’ve discovered so far).

I have before now experienced that the best way to get a vivid impression and feeling of a landscape is to sit down before it and read, or become otherwise absorbed in thought; for then,...

I hate books that are hard to read. It takes me a month to finish it and by that time I’ve forgotten some of the characters and what happened at the beginning. But then again,...

Perhaps there is some secret sort of homing instinct in books that brings them to their perfect readers. How delightful if that were true.

Betsy returned to her chair, took off her coat and hat, opened her book and forgot the world again.

There is no substitute for books in the life of a child. (1952)

Writing barely differs from Talking and Reading. It appoints your hand while they engage your mouth and eyes respectively. The trio need the mind to combine sensible words from a meaningful arrangement of the ‘simple’...

When was the last time someone read aloud to you? Probably when you were a child, and if you think back, you’ll remember how safe you felt, tucked under the covers, or curled in someone’s...

I’m no longer a child and I still want to be, to live with the pirates. Because I want to live forever in wonder. The difference between me as a child and me as an...

She sewed as she read. For the Vicar considered that sewing was an occupation and that reading was not. He was silent as long as his daughter sewed and when she read he talked.

Readers are distrustful and, although they accept the rules of the proposed game upon entry, they remain on the lookout for the slightest contradiction and often allow their own prejudices to lead them astray. When...