The oldest books are still only just out to those who have not read them.

The only end of writing is to enable readers better to enjoy life or better to endure it.

I write things that I would like to read myself.

Literature for me was a magnificent destiny for which I was not yet fully prepared. 76

Since I became a novelist I have discovered that I am biased. Either I think a new novel is worse than mine and I don’t like it, or I suspect it is better than my...

I consider myself a perpetual student. You seek and learn every day: from an experiment in the lab, from reading a scientific journal, from taking care of a patient. Because of this, I rarely get...

Some people are like fireworks: alluring from a distance, but fatal close up

The paper is my savior, the pen my blood, to words that shed my world.

In life, the faster you move on the more people you’ll have to say goodbye to

The ability to read becomes devalued when what one has learned to read adds nothing of importance to one’s life.

Reading helps children achieve their divine destinies

My ears become my conduit to the world. In the darkness I listen—to thrillers, to detective novels, to romances; to family sagas, potboilers and historical novels; to ghost stories and classic fiction and chick lit;...

I do not care a fig for any woman that knows even what an author means.

READ.

I’m always reading plays, and when I find something that I really want to do, then I’ll make the time to do it.

Now you see, Dr. Stadler, you’re speaking as if this book were addressing to a thinking audience. If it were, one would have to be concerned with such matters as accuracy, validity, logic and the...

She read all sorts of things: travels, and sermons, and old magazines. Nothing was so dull that she couldn’t get through with it. Anything really interesting absorbed her so that she never knew what was...

a course of reading.” Distrust a course of reading! People who really care for books read all of them. There is no other course.

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.

You are either in a state of perfection or a state of learning. Reading is one of the best ways to learn about our lives and purpose!

A naive, excitable teenaged reader is a beautiful thing. Someone who’s never heard of Elizabeth Bennet or Jay Gatsby, until you tell him. And they all still believe in truth. That’s the fun of it.

God is never tired of bringing the sun out every morning, taking it in the evenings and bringing out the moon.

That’s it then. This is how it ends. I haven’t even read Proust.

We want the author to give us answers when all he can do is give us desires.

Reading is soul work!