At one magical instant in your early childhood, the page of a book—that string of confused, alien ciphers—shivered into meaning. Words spoke to you, gave up their secrets; at that moment, whole universes opened. You...

The detective story is the normal recreation of noble minds.

the joy of someone who had been a reader all her life, whose world had been immeasurably enlarged by the words of others.

I write almost always in the third person, and I don’t think the narrator is male or female anyway. They’re both, and young and old, and wise and silly, and sceptical and credulous, and innocent...

Human contacts have been so highly valued in the past only because reading was not a common accomplishment and because books were scarce and difficult to reproduce…As reading becomes more and more habitual and widespread,...

A fine gentleman like that, they said, had no need of books. Let him leave books, they said, to the palsied or the dying. But worse was to come. For once the disease of reading...

Novels institutionalize the ruse of eros. It becomes a narrative texture of sustained incongruence, emotional and cognitive. It permits the reader to stand in triangular relation to the characters in the story and reach into...

…there are pleasures to be had from books beyond being lightly entertained. There is the pleasure of being challenged; the pleasure of feeling one’s range and capacities expanding; the pleasure of entering into an unfamiliar...

Just as an apple a day keeps the doctor away,a book a week keeps the mind ever sleek

We have more choice than ever before about where and how we buy and read books.

You read a lot?” Galina finally asked.”Yes. It’s an escape into another world.” She tried to keep her words light instead of sad, thoughts of her family in her head. “Sometimes that is the best...

I’d like my readers to feel they want to follow my characters off the page at the end of the book.

It was an emergency!” Seth blurted. “Read my lips – emergency reading – not some demented idea of fun. If I was starving, I would eat asparagus. If somebody held a gun to my head,...

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