If you wanted to be average, you would not be reading this book.

I’m a reader who uses fiction as a way of worrying about life.

The true birthplace is that wherein for the first time one looks intelligently upon oneself; my first homelands have been books, and to a lesser degree schools.

… l’unica compagnia erano le pagine con le orecchie dei suoi romanzi, mentre se ne stava seduta con aria imbronciata sulla poltrona

Great writers wield their words like a weapon; a double-edged sword to strike their readers with truth where they least expect it. -Matthew D. Forgenti

I have good reason to be content,for thank God I can read andperhaps understand Shakespeare to his depths.

One of the ironies of college is that the impossibility of reading your way out of the modern predicament is something you learn about, as a student, by reading. Part of the value of a...

We tell ourselves stories in order to live.

Every time a written word is put to page it is the opportunity to expand our minds, whether we are the writer or the reader. Enjoy the journey wherever it may take you!

Deux choses donnent du sens à la vie : les livres et l’amour.

Sometimes I just want to shout, “READ ALL MY FAVORITE BOOKS!

The first time I read an excellent book, it is to me just as if I had gained a new friend. When I read a book over I have perused before, it resembles the meeting...

The pen, a double-edged mystery: cuts the writer, heals the reader.

Reading a great work of literature can truly be likened to having a conversation with a great mind.

We profit little by books we do not enjoy.

I remember that story. You have read it four times.” Samson shrugged. “Why should I stop with the first reading? Nobody says, ‘That was a fine piece of music. I’ll never listen to that again.”...

It is when we are faced with death that we turn most bookish.

To read a novel is to wonder constantly, even at moments when we lose ourselves most deeply in the book: How much of this is fantasy, and how much is real?

No one knows as well as I how much nonsense is printed in books.

The book thief has struck for the first time – the beginning of an illustrious career.

To read is to climb the high places!

Always write exactly what you’re feeling at the exact moment when writing something like poetry or an emotional novel. Put yourself, pour all emotions into your work…make yourself cry, feel joy if you are writing...

So Matilda’s strong young mind continued to grow, nurtured by the voices of all those authors who had sent their books out into the world like ships on the sea.

Read books are far less valuable than unread ones. The library should contain as much of what you do not know as your financial means, mortgage rates, and the currently tight real-estate market alow you...

Her constant orders for beheading are shocking to those modern critics of children’s literature who feel that juvenile fiction should be free of all violence and especially violence with Freudian undertones. Even the Oz books...

I like two types of dust: pixie dust and dust from old, first edition books.

Dare to imagine. Dare to be. Books are the seeds. Dreams are the soil. The fruit of the harvest, a world reborn.

As historical texts become rich and conceptually dense, readers may slow down not because they fail to comprehend, but because the very act of comprehension demands that they stop to TALK with their texts. In...

Look for the copper tablet-box,Undo its bronze lock,Open the door to its secret,Lift out the lapis lazuli tablet and read it,The story of that man, Gilgamesh, who went through all kinds of sufferings.

No, no, it’s not the books you are looking for! Take it where you can find it, in old phonograph records, in old motion pictures, and in old friends; look for it in nature and...

We read each other through our eyes, and anatomically they are an extension of our brains. When we catch someone’s eye, we look into a mind.

Take a good book to bed with you – books do not snore.

[A]ll who are smitten with the love of books think cheaply of the world and wealth; as Jerome says to Vigilantius: The same man cannot love both gold and books… The hideousness of vice is...

Julia could form no opinion of Robert, the bespectacled middle child, for he passed the entire journey with his nose stuck in a book, returning only monosyllabic answers to any questions put to him

Reading Proust isn’t just reading a book, it’s an experience and you can’t reject an experience.

Keep reminding yourself that literature is one of the saddest roads that leads to everything.

He chose The Metamorphosis over The Trial, he chose Bartleby over Moby-Dick, he chose A Simple Heart over Bouvard and Pecuchet, and A Christmas Carol over A Tale of Two Cities or The Pickwick Papers....

Reading is sometimes an ingenious device for avoiding thought.

Most of the time, we don’t know others; we only know our own ideas about others

M. Proust was more severe than M. de Caillavet on Anatole France: “He was selfish and supercilious. He had read so much that he had left his heart in other people’s books, and all that...

Watch out for your ambitions: they may play on your values

Good books are about everything.

Obliqueness is the curse of the reading class.

Old books that we have known but not possessed cross our path and invite themselves over. New books try to seduce us daily with tempting titles and tantalizing covers.

Language spread its warm, absurd rays over all my adolescent thoughts, and I felt the way we all long to feel: moody, lonely, lovesick and explosive with the prospects of tomorrow.

There are only two ways, really, to become a writer. One is to write. The other is to read.

Sometimes he spent hours together in the great libraries of Paris, those catacombs of departed authors, rummaging among their hoards of dusty and obsolete works in quest of food for his unhealthy appetite. He was,...

The difference between Marilyn’s and Jayne’s approach to intellectual pursuits is that Marilyn carried big heavy books around and hung out with brainy people to absorb their intellect, while Jayne really had a thirst for...

Often on a wet day I begin counting up; what I’ve read and what I haven’t read.

My impulse now, as then, is to disagree. The majority of people in this country who haunt bookstores, go to readings and book festivals or simply read in the privacy of their homes are not...