Life is wonderful and strange…and it’s also absolutely mundane and tiresome. It’s hilarious and it’s deadening. It’s a big, screwed-up morass of beauty and change and fear and all our lives we oscillate between awe...

Ivanov had been a party member since 1902. Back then he had tried to write stories in the manner of Tolstoy, Chekhov, Gorky, or rather he had tried to plagiarize them without much success, which...

Books are like friends to me. Words come alive on the page.

You can see the size of people’s dreams from their profit and loss calculations

Reading fiction is important. It is a vital means of imagining a life other than our own, which in turn makes us more empathetic beings. Following complex story lines stretches our brains beyond the 140...

The trick is to teach yourself to read in small sips as well as long swallows.

Reading words puts them in your mind. You never forget. Even when you don’t get a chance to dwell on the music, you can hear it in your head.

If you drop your Kindle in the toilet, you’re done.

I have no feelings of guilt regarding the books I have not read and perhaps will never read; I know that my books have unlimited patience. They will wait for me till the end of...

If time is precious, no book that will not improve by repeated readings deserves to be read at all.

We were very poor. But between the covers of books I could go anywhere, I could be anybody, I could do anything. I began to read about people of great accomplishment. As I read those...

There were pools of light among the stacks, directly beneath the bulbs which Philip had switched on, but it was now with an unexpected fearfulness that he saw how the books stretched away into the...

Most of what makes a book ‘good’ is that we are reading it at the right moment for us.

The only advice, indeed, that one person can give another about reading is to take no advice, to follow your own instincts, to use your own reason, to come to your own conclusions. If this...

Between my first book tour, in 2003, and the next one, in 2009, many of the places I visited had undergone a significant transformation or vanished: Cody’s in Berkeley, seven branch libraries in Philadelphia, twelve...

Some stories consumed you, they made time stop, your worries float into the ether, and when it came to my reading habits I chose romance over any other genre. The appeal of the happy ever...

The sum of things to be known is inexhaustible, and however long we read, we shall never come to the end of our story-book.”(Introductory lecture as professor of Latin at University College, London, 3 October...

History was my favourite subject at school and in my spare time I read historical novels voraciously from Heidi to the Scarlet Pimpernel and from Georgette Heyer to Agatha Christie.

Idleness is the enemy of the soul; and therefore the brethren ought to be employed in manual labor at certain times, at others, in devout reading.

To be a well-favoured man is the gift of fortune; but to write and read comes by nature.

When I want to read a novel, I write one.

Only the nonreader fears books.

No, this one is pretty good,” Nick said, gazing at the spine with an air of judicious concession. Sometimes his memory of books he pretended to have read became almost as vivid as that of...

Vous craignez les livres comme certaines bourgades ont craint les violons. Laissez lire, et laissez danser; ces deux amusements ne feront jamais de mal au monde.

Individuals who frequently read fiction seem to be better able to understand other people, empathize with them and see the world from their perspective.

Books were her refuge. Having set herself to learn the Russian language, she read every Russian book she could find. But French was the language she preferred, and she read French books indiscriminately, picking up...

Dis-lui que les livres ont la puissance que leur accorde leur lecteur et que celle-ci peut être sans fin.

Many things embarrass me, but reading isn’t one of them. I’m not ashamed of my slightly weird collection of prison memoirs. Nor the flaky meditation books. After all, I can pretend I never read those.

If a book doesn’t inspire you to read more, it was not worth read.

My characters don’t always know more than the reader does, because my readers get the best seat in Paper House.

Reading to small children is a specialty.

Is there a better method of departure by night than this quiet bon voyage with an open book, the sole companion who has come to see you off, to wave you into the dark waters...

As ever, books remained a medium through which Theodore and Edith connected and interpreted larger world.

The book and I secret ourselvesBehind the paneled door.We merge our thoughts in retrospectOf ancient mystic lore.We spend a pleasant quiet hour,Nor know it passed us by…The easy chair, the shaded lamp,A well-loved book and...

On some level, I think we want our reading self to represent our best self.

Eva walked along the wall that held all of Michael’s books. Shelves of science texts – physics, astronomy, a full set of Darwin’s writings, new works in biomedical genetics – these were at the bottom,...

I couldn’t live a week without a private library – indeed, I’d part with all my furniture and squat and sleep on the floor before I’d let go of the 1500 or so books I...

Reading that pleases and profits, that together delights and instructs, has all that one should desire.

the Real-World was a sprawling mess of a book in need of a good editor.

He had no ideal world of dead heroes; he knew little of the life of men in the past; he must find the beings to whom he could cling with loving admiration among those who...

With so much reading ahead of you, the temptation might be to speed up. But in fact it’s essential to slow down and read every word. Because one important thing that can be learned by...

Things started to get out of control when I began reading that I was a superstar.

Dominate in your domain; You can do it.

A responsible woman is one who sees opportunities of service and responds to them quickly. In her dwells the ability to see and respond to opportunities.

Woe be to him that reads but one book.

We were never organized readers who would see a book through to its end in any sory of logical order. We weave in and out of words like tourists on a hop-on, hop-off bus tour....

The importance of reading, for me, is that it allows you to dream.Reading not only educates, but is relaxing and allows you to feed your imagination – creating beautiful pictures from carefully chosen words.

In the shop window you have promptly identified the cover with the title you were looking for. Following this visual trail, you have forced your way through the shop past the thick barricade of Books...

There are books, that one has for twenty years without reading them, that one always keeps at hand, that one takes along from city to city, from country to country, carefully packed, even when there...

The creator of Sir John Falstaff, of Hamlet, and of Rosalind also makes me wish I could be more myself. But that, as I argue throughout this book, is why we should read, and why...