It’s Not About You, Mr. Santa Claus

You’ll never be alone if you’ve got a book.

Literature is my sandbox. In it I play, build my forts and castles, spend glorious time. It is the world outside that box that gives me trouble. I have adapted tamely, though not conventionally, to...

We read in slow, long motions, as if drifting in space, weightless. We read full of prejudice, malignantly. We read generously, making excuses for the text, filling gaps, mending faults. And sometimes, when the stars...

Famous Writers Who Loathe E-Books,” reflects or caters to a silly idea: that not being interested in using a particular technology is the same as hating and despising it.

1.Lesen ist ein bloßes Surrogat des eigenen Denkens. Man läßt dabei seine Gedanken von dem Andern am Gängelbande führen. […] Lesen soll man nur dann, wann auch die Quelle der eigenen Gedanken stockt; was auch...

Lately, because computer technology has made self-publishing an easier and less expensive venture, I’m getting a lot of review copies of amateur books by writers who would be better advised to hone their craft before...

The atmosphere of my faith brightens with every Christ-centered book I read.

What’s the use trying to read Shakespeare, especially in one of those little paper editions whose pages get ruffled, or stuck together with sea-water?

I have never been able to resist a book about books.

Never give up. Dare to Dream. Dare to believe.

Reading is accumulating knowledge. But not only that. Reading offers us every day what religion promises us for a posthumous and improbable future: the possibility of living beyond what our lifetime allows us to.

I love the place; the magnificent books; I require books as I require air.

I libri non sono un passatempo. Parlano di altre vite. Di altri mondi. Altro che far passare il tempo, Sir Kevin; non so cosa darei per averne di più.

We are absurdly accustomed to the miracle of a few written signs being able to contain immortal imagery, involutions of thought, new worlds with live people, speaking, weeping, laughing. We take it for granted so...

The place trembled with sound. I didn’t need to do anything. They would do it all. But you had to be careful. Drunk as they were they could immediately detect any false gesture, any false...

The books we love offer a sketch of a whole universe that we secretly inhabit, and in which we desire the other person to assume a role.One of the conditions of happy romantic compatibility is,...

Hikayatin mo lahat ng kakilala mo na magkaroon ng kahit isa man lang paboritong libro sa buhay nila. Dahil wala nang mas kawawa pa sa mga taong literado pero hindi nagbabasa.

It is just as honorable. . .to dig in the dirt as to dig into books. The mind can do its best work only when th body has been developed equally well.

Reading is poor man’s way of travelling not just around the world but into the minds of people.

Interest is never enough. If it doesn’t haunt you, you’ll never write it well. What haunts and obsesses you may, with luck and labour, interest your readers. What merely interests you is sure to bore...

Geeks are not the world’s rowdiest people. We’re quiet and introspective, and usually more comfortable communing with our keyboards or a good book than each other. Our idea of how to paint theEmerald City red...

I always thought the joy of reading a book is not knowing what happens next. (Leonard Shelby, Memento)

A book you finish reading is not the same book it was before you read it.

I had never known the pleasure of reading, of exploring the recesses of the soul, of letting myself be carried away by imagination, beauty, and the mystery of fiction and language. For me all those...

There seemed no reason why she shouldn’t try writing something in between, but she was discovering once again that reading and writing were not the same – you couldn’t just soak it up and then...

If a book has anything to say, it burns with a quiet laugh, because any book worth its salt points up and out of itself.

I do not like postmodernism, postapocalyptic settings, postmortem narrators, or magic realism. I rarely respond to supposedly clever formal devices, multiple fonts, pictures where they shouldn’t be—basically, gimmicks of any kind. I find literary fiction...

I’m a reading addict. I can’t live without it, like someone who is addicted to drugs.

There has always been, for me, this other world, this second world to fall back on–a more reliable world in so far as it does not hide that its premise is illusion.

I’m pretty sure my addiction to reading has just reached a whole new level.

Not being the sort to throw a book, she pounded her fist on her cushion.

In a word, literature is my Utopia. Here I am not disfranchised. No barrier of the senses shuts me out from the sweet, gracious discourse of my book-friends. They talk to me without embarrassment or...

Reading maketh a full man; and writing an axact man. And, therefore, if a man write little, he need have a present wit; and if he read little, he need have much cunning to seem...

Be a King. Dare to be Different, dare to manifest your greatness.

You don’t need to go running from pillar to post looking for what God looks like.

This will never be a civilized country until we expend more money for books than we do for chewing gum.

I don’t have time for invisible books when there are so many real books to read.

Loads of children read books about dinosaurs, underwater monsters, dragons, witches, aliens, and robots. Essentially, the people who read SF, fantasy and horror haven’t grown out of enjoying the strange and weird.

The world was a terrible place, cruel, pitiless, dark as a bad dream. Not a good place to live. Only in books could you find pity, comfort, happiness – and love. Books loved anyone who...

The imperative to take notes as one read moved the seventeenth century Jesuit scholar Jeremias Drexel to write that, ‘reading is useless, vain and silly when no writing is involved, unless you are reading [devotionally]...

they’re simple stories. Real life is a story, too, only much more complicated. It’s still got a beginning, a middle, and an end. Everyone follows the same rules, you know. . . It’s just that...

A reader lives a thousand lives before he dies, said Jojen. The man who never reads lives only one.

How can we read when people need our help? It’s a luxury. A stupid luxury.

I never read Playboy before I started working there and stopped reading it the day I quit.

What was a book? Not just ink and fiber and stitchery: a series of processes. To a wizard, it was not a static object–but a human thought caught and bound, made concrete through sacred technology....

My father never put a book into my hands and never forbade a book. Instead, he let me roam and graze, making my own more or less appropriate selections. I read gory tales of historic...

She had forced herself to learn to read – picked up bits and pieces, here and there, from the very few teachers who had been patient with her; from looking at words while out and...

The progress of the friendship between Catherine and Isabella was quick as its beginning had been warm…and if a rainy morning deprived them of other enjoyments, they were still resolute in meeting in defiance of...

There is something wonderful about a book. We can pick it up. We can heft it. We can read it. We can set it down. We can think of what we have read. It does...