true.” If he cannot do this by himself, he is obliged to go to someone who can. This may be a priest or a rabbi, or it may be his superior in the party hierarchy,...

In this way, I was able to place my own concerns aside and curl myself up in the cocoon of somebody else’s imagination. My life was suspended – I was in neither one place nor...

Life is limited, but by writing, and reading, we can live in different worlds, get inside the skins and minds of other people, and, in this way, push out the boundaries of our own lifes.

We read literature for a lot of reasons, but two of the most compelling ones are to get out of ourselves and our life stories and – equally important – to find ourselves by understanding...

I find things hidden in books: dried flowers, locks of hair, tickets, labels, receipt, invoices, photographs, postcards, all manner of cards. I find letters, unpublished works by the ordinary, the anguished, the illiterate. Clumsily written...

When I was a child, it was a matter of pride that I could plow through a Nancy Drew story in one afternoon, and begin another in the evening. . . . I was probably...

J. Alfred Prufrock measured his life out in coffee spoons. I measure mine out in pages.

Personally, I am a hedonistic reader; I have never read a book merely because it was ancient. I read books for the aesthetic emotions they offer me, and I ignore the commentaries and criticism.

We do not learn for the benefit of anyone, we learn to unlearn ignorance.

In one sense, reading is a great waste of time. In another sense, it is a great extension of time, a way for one person to live a thousand and one lives in a single...

Past ages come to us in new ways. For instance, they bore or disturb us. The dead say things we would or could not say in ways that appall , bless, and startle us. Reading...

It had been a good day, all things considered. I had managed rather well on my own. I opened Grandfather’s Bible. This is what it would be like when I had my own shop, or...

Often the adult book is not for you, not yet, or will only be for you when you’re ready. But sometimes you will read it anyway, and you will take from it whatever you can....

I’m constantly reading books on God or the absence of God and atheism.

So began my love affair with books. Years later, as a college student, I remember having a choice between a few slices of pizza that would have held me over for a day or a...

When I read a novel I am not here. I am transported to far-off places, my eyes unseeing of the words on the page, busy with a scene being played out in my mind’s eye,...

There were two kinds of students who liked the library: those who devoured one book after another and those who savored the same book repeatedly. Now she understood those rereaders differently … she realized it...

I must judge for myself, but how can I judge, how can any man judge, unless his mind has been opened and enlarged by reading.

Life is obsession and so is reading 😀

I can blend words easily with my pen, and show concepts from deep within. Yet not everyone gets the message I send. So why do I even let these words begin? Maybe they will soak...

On my website there’s a quote from the writer Anthony Burgess: “The greatest gift is the passion for reading. It is cheap, it consoles, it distracts, it excites, it gives you knowledge of the world...

BIG books are better. There, I said it and it’s true. 

Instead of a book, what if we’re actually writing (or not writing) in the margins of our lives? What if our lives are books? What is the sign of our presence? Are we pressing into...

At its best, fantasy rewards the reader with a sense of wonder about what lies within the heart of the commonplace world. The greatest tales are told over and over, in many ways, through centuries....

But remember that the Captain belongs to the most dangerous enemy to truth and freedom, the solid unmoving catting of the majority.

A lot of the people who read a bestselling novel, for example, do not read much other fiction. By contrast, the audience for an obscure novel is largely composed of people who read a lot....

I had no idea that reading it would lead me to a cabin. It’s dangerous to open a book

I also did some jail time a few years ago. Spent a whole summer in jail reading books. I pumped a ton of new knowledge and new thinking into myself.

These short stories are vast structures existing mostly in the subconscious of our cultural history. They will live with the reader long after the words have been translated into ideas and dreams. That’s because a...

Readers may be divided into four classes:1) Sponges, who absorb all that they read and return it in nearly the same state, only a little dirtied.2) Sand-glasses, who retain nothing and are content to get...

A story can always break into pieces while it sits inside a book on a shelf; and, decades after we have read it even twenty times, it can open us up, by cut or caress,...

Reading is like thinking, like praying, like talking to a friend, like expressing your ideas, like listening to other people’s ideas, like listening to music, like looking at the view, like taking a walk on...

Maybe it’s not about the journey but rather the way you imagine the journey when you read a book.

The biggest truths are the ones told after the longest silences

The paperback is very interesting but I find it will never replace the hardcover book — it makes a very poor doorstop.

A tried and true way to get your children interested in books and reading is to read to them when they are young.

Every story is entitled to have a ‘happily ever after’ ending. However, not all characters are so deserving.

And when I read, and really I do not read so much, only a few authors, – a few men that I discovered by accident – I do this because they look at things in...

Life happened because I turned the pages.

[Harry] had always suffered from a vague restlessness, a longing for adventure that she told herself severely was the result of reading too many novels when she was a small child.

I don’t take up the story and follow it as if it were a road, taking mesomewhere… I go into it, and move back and forth and settle here and there, and stay in it...

An old book was a time capsule. When you opened the front cover, you opened a door to another world—a world accessible through a kind of looking glass made of hard-board and cloth. The author’s...

Remember that the truth within yourself will always be greater than the truth found in these pages. These stories are here to guide us—to help us find that truth, not to tell us what it...

Once she knows how to read there’s only one thing you can teach her to believe in and that is herself.

are different from us. They don’t care about books and such things.

You know that frustrating feeling of losing the page in your book? You didn’t want to go too far ahead and spoil the surprise, and you didn’t want to go too far back, so you...

Hugo headed off toward the door to leave, but the bookstore was warm and quiet, and the teetering piles of books fascinated him.

We bring to everything we read the expectations we have built up by a lifetime of reading.

Often, when I am able to check out a book, I read it a dozen times before returning it, desperate to remain lost in the magic of someone else’s story.

[When asked about Writing Conferences]”You meet people that will change your life.