Books make my world complete.

She knew where she stood, when she stood among books.

And what would happen if we never read the classics? There comes a point in life, it seems to me, where you have to decide whether you’re a Person of Letters or merely someone who...

Think of yourself as a detective looking for clues to a book’s general theme or idea, alert for anything that will make it clearer. Heeding the suggestions we have made will help you sustain this...

These stories were very old, as old as people, and they had survived because they were very powerful indeed. They were the tales that echoed in the head long after the books that contained them...

This was the time in her life that she fell upon books as the only door out of her cell. They became half her world.

I could spend all day lost in someone else’s imagination. I love reading.

Every time you think of escaping mentally or physically, grab the book that lies inches away from your heart.

Learning new things exercises the brain in such a titillating way.

No days, perhaps, of all our childhood are ever so fully lived are those that we had regarded as not being lived at all: days spent wholly with a favourite book.

Living is worth the effort if only because without life we could not read or imagine stories.

When I later discovered that she (illustrator Faith Jaques) was a compulsive reader who loved to be alone and kept cats because they are the only pets that allow you to be both, my adoration...

History! Read it and weep!

We don’t need to have just one favorite. We keep adding favorites. Our favorite book is always the book that speaks most directly to us at a particular stage in our lives. And our lives...

To become a ‘good reader’ one must give oneself over to a regime of concentrated pleasure. One does not set out to read a book a day (there is no necessary pleasure in that) but...

Fiction allows us to slide into these other heads, these other places, and look out through other eyes. And then in the tale we stop before we die, or we die vicariously and unharmed, and...

They will need you to put the right books in their hands, book in which they can lose themselves and books in which they can find themselves.

I read for pleasure and that is the moment I learn the most.

Why do all your friends talk like books?

At some point in reading, we realize we have to read not just the books that we’d enjoy, but the books that move us, touch us, those that break us and hurt us, those which...

There are worse crimes than burning books. One of them is not reading them.

You can’t just be reading books all the time and leave the writting of them to others.

As long as no more than a small minority are capable of reading and writing, universal alphabetization seems like a messianic project. Only once everyone has this ability does one notice the catastrophe that almost...

There were two sets of double doors leading out of the antechamber, one marked STACKS and the other TOMES. Not knowing the difference between the two, I headed to the ones labeled STACKS. That was...

The greatest book is not the one whose message engraves itself on the brain, as a telegraphic message engraves itself on the ticker-tape, but the one whose vital impact opens up other viewpoints, and from...

Literature takes us away from our grey everyday experience, but brings us back enriched with new sensibilities.

I read the writings of great men and women so that I can think bigger thoughts.

To hell with you. To hell with you and to hell with the Internet.

[T]he only luxury he allows himself is buying books, paperback books, mostly novels, American novels, British novels, foreign novels in translation, but in the end books are not luxuries so much as necessities, and reading...

You, my reader, who see me close, wonder about my heartbeats and measure my words, you my close friend who know my eyes and the home of their prose, you, my only lover, who always...

Read a lot. But read as a writer, to see how other writers are doing it. And make your knowledge of literature in English as deep and broad as you can. In workshops, writers are...

I cannot remember the books I’ve read any more than the meals I have eaten; even so, they have made me.

Perhaps reading and writing books is one of the last defences human dignity has left, because in the end they remind us of what God once reminded us before He too evaporated in this age...

No encounter occured that day, and I was glad of it; I took out of my pocket a little Homer I had not opened since leaving Marseilles, reread three lines of the Odyssey, learned them...

I haven’t read much, but it still seems impossible to me that anyone, no matter how much he read, could’ve read every book in the world. There must be so many of them, and I...

I think reading is a gift. It was a gift that was given to me as a child by many people, and now as an adult and a writer, I’m trying to give a little...

Difficult times are sharpeners for the mind

Get books, sit yourself down anywhere, and go to reading them yourself.

My late husband and I started our sons off as readers at a very young age. Today, they are voracious readers.

I’m glad I see with my eyes and not the pages I’ve read.

Reading gives one something to think about other than one’s self.

Just go on reading, as well as you can, and be sure that when the children get the thrill of the story, for which you wait, they will be asking more questions, and pertinent ones,...

We read books to find out who we are. What other people, real or imaginary, do and think and feel… is an essential guide to our understanding of what we ourselves are and may become.

The art of not reading is a very important one. It consists in not taking an interest in whatever may be engaging the attention of the general public at any particular time. When some political...

I like to read and write because it is the ONLY thing that takes my mind off of the real world and my spinning worries. It is a time I can be free of anxiety,...

My depth of purse is not so greatNor yet my bibliophilic greed,That merely buying doth elate:The books I buy I like to read:Still e’en when dawdling in a mead,Beneath a cloudless summer sky,By bank of...

Few people ask from books what books can give us. Most commonly we come to books with blurred and divided minds, asking of fiction that it shall be true, of poetry that it shall be...

To read a newspaper is to refrain from reading something worthwhile. [….] The first discipline of education must therefore be to refuse resolutely to feed the mind with canned chatter.

This is the strange life of books that you enter along as a writer, mapping an unknown territory that arises as you travel. If you succeed in the voyage, others enter after, one at a...

Writing and reading decrease our sense of isolation. They deepen and widen and expand our sense of life: they feed the soul. When writers make us shake our heads with the exactness of their prose...