An entire life spent reading would have fulfilled my every desire; I already knew that at the age of seven. The texture of the world is painful, inadequate; unalterable, or so it seems to me....

Father and Ivy used to go off on their excursions, never knowing that I was relieved when they were gone. That I’d wear my nightgowns all day and read from dawn till dusk.

All readers have reading in common.

A newspaper that you’re not reading can be used for anything; and the same people didn’t think it was immoral to wrap their garbage in newspaper.

But we do need a breather. We do need knowledge. And perhaps in a thousand years we might pick smaller cliffs to jump off. The books are to remind us what asses and fools we...

Goodness, Mr. Cellini, I’ve not time to answer all these questions. I’ve got to get on.’With what? She seldom did anything but read, as far as he knew. She must have read thousands of books,...

I tell you, the difference for me is between being victimized, terrorized, numbed by reading about different disasters, or reducing the anxiety by getting up and doing something about it, at whatever level.

I wanted to crawl in between those black lines of print, the way you crawl through a fence, and go to sleep under that beautiful big green fig-tree.

…And another item from the growing file of people who voluntarily wear dunce caps… You’ll be talking cordially to someone and make an offhand reference, ‘I recently read where–‘ and they’ll cut you off and...

How had it come about that these particular designs were chosen as our letters? Who decreed what sound would accompany each shape? And how was it decided the manner they would come together to form...

There is in Albert Camus’ literary craftsmanship a seductive intelligence that could almost make a reader dismiss his philosophical intentions if he had not insisted on making them so clear.

You only benefit from books if you can give something back to them. What I mean is, if you approach them in the spirit of a duel, so you can both wound and be wounded,...

The second suggestion is to think as well as to read. I know people who read and read, and for all the good it does them they might just as well cut bread-and-butter. They take...

People are like mugs with different handles. Some can be held by their emotions; others by their logic, passions, desires or dreams

It would be difficult to define the limits of his reading.

Life is a two-way ticket; inbound is random, outbound is unknown

I don’t need no Smith and Wesson, man, I got Merriam and Webster.

Come to the book as you would come to an unexplored land. Come without a map. Explore it and draw your own map.

I don’t remember ever feeling lonely; in fact, on the rare occasions when I met other children I found their games and their talk far less interesting than the adventures and dialogues I read in...

I insist on a lot of time being spent, almost every day, to just sit and think. That is very uncommon in American business. I read and think. So I do more reading and thinking,...

Reading is not simply an intellectual pursuit but an emotional and spiritual one. It lights the candle in the hurricane lamp of self; that’s why it survives.”[Turning the Page: The future of reading is backlit...

A woman reading is a grave temptation.

His reading suggested a man swimming in the sea among the wreckage of his ship, and trying to save his life by greedily clutching first at one spar and then at another.

documentary,” whose outcomes are flagrantly manipulative, self-serving, or both. Usually both.

somehow, somewhere” or Alice’s backyard, a world that runs parallel to the real one, whose occupants need no passport or documentation. The only requirements for entry are an open mind, a restless desire to know...

Reading is sometimes thought of as a form of escapism, and it’s a common turn of phrase to speak of getting lost in a book. But a book can also be where one finds oneself;...

If I’m engrossed in a book, I have to rearrange my thoughts before I can mingle with other people, because otherwise they might think I was strange.

Readership is highly dependent upon format and distribution as much as it is on content.

My fingers burn behind the keys of my typewriter, the lettering fading with every thoughtful strike. The many words I write I dare not stall; my mind perpetually alert for my magnum opus call.

And as I surveyed the clutter of his study I was pleased to see that he was a man after my own heart. All of his money appeared to have been spent on either books...

Not a wall in the building lacked books. Books even occupied the space above doorways.

That’s how you have to read this book, you see. You wade through a few sentences, then stop and think about them, then wade through a few more.

great books are the ones we need

It is a most wonderful comfort to sit alone beneath a lamp, book spread before you, and commune with someone from the past whom you have never met.

People read books to escape the uncertainties of life.

To acquire the habit of reading is to construct for yourself a refuge from almost all the miseries of life.

When reading, we don’t fall in love with the characters’ appearance. We fall in love with their words, their thoughts, and their hearts. We fall in love with their souls.

I find that when I come out of the library I’m in what I call the library bliss of being totally taken away from the distractions of life.”[Woman’s Day magazine, March 12, 2002]

Get lost in a story, in a dream fantasy…

Books and movies, they are not mere entertainment. They sustain me and help me cope with my real life.

As for reading, I wish I had a magic door to a library where I could go in, read for days and days, and come back in the same minute I left. I’m still looking...

Bea says that the art of reading is slowly dying, that it’s an intimate ritual, that a book is a mirror that offers us only what we carry inside us, that when we read, we...

Peter Pan has to be the book of my childhood. Come to think of it, it’s the book of my adulthood too. It’s a book which, in the reading of it, takes me back to...

Like the roller coaster of life…novels aren’t fun without ups and downs and even an occasional loop.

Every book is a world.

(She) could have read for hours, except that recently she had discovered holes and crevices between the words which she immediately had to fill with her own ideas until she was fed up with patching...

Any book worth banning is a book worth reading.

It had been startling and disappointing to me to find out that story books had been written by people, that books were not natural wonders, coming up of themselves like grass. Yet regardless of where...

I’m really not responsible for what mental operation people have when they’re reading my books other than the ones which are created by literary effects.

Never did she find anything so difficult as to keep herself from losing her temper when she was suddenly disturbed while absorbed in a book.