As centuries of dictators have known, an illiterate crowd is the easiest to rule; since the craft of reading cannot be untaught once it has been acquired, the second-best recourse is to limit its scope.

If you can read & write then the opportunities are endless, if you just believe in yourself then anything is possible, you can become anyone and do anything, what’s more is, you can take others...

He wanted nothing, for the time being, except to understand …. Without advice, assistance or plan, he began reading an incongruous assortment of books; he would find some passage which he could not understand in...

Imogen was a bright girl naturally, but she had read so many novels that her brain was completely turned.

Reading doesn’t mean accepting everything you read, it means reasoning everything you read.

And no matter what anybody says, I don’t believe all this trouble started when women got the vote. As far as I’m concerned, it goddamn well got started when you taught each other how to...

…the reader who plucks a book from her shelf only once is as deprived as the listener who, after attending a single performance of a Beethoven symphony, never hears it again.

Reading is dreaming. Reading is entering a world of imagination shared between reader and author. Reading is getting beyond the words to the story or meaning underneath.

I was in Nashville, Tennessee last year. After the show I went to a Waffle House. I’m not proud of it, I was hungry. And I’m alone, I’m eating and I’m reading a book, right?...

Literature was the passport to enter a larger life; that is, the zone of freedom. Literature was freedom. Especially in a time in which the values of reading and inwardness are so strenuously challenged, literature...

Think of this – that the writer wrote alone, and the reader read alone, and they were alone with each other. True, the writer may have been alone also with Spenser’s golden apples in the...

I read a lot. I always have, but in those two years I gorged myself on books with a voluptuous, almost erotic gluttony. I would go to the local library and take out as many...

In certain books—some way in the first few paragraphs you know that you have met a brother.

I could read the great books but the great books don’t interest me.

To be a devout reader was to be an acolyte of solace.

Hindi ba mas tama na sa halip na maliitin ang kabataan dahil sa binabasa nilang manunulat ay purihin sila sa pagbabasa, at saka samantalahin ang pagkakataon para hikayatin sila at ipakilala sa iba pang makabuluhang...

Dreams, books, are each a world; and books, we know,Are a substantial world, both pure and good:Round these, with tendrils strong as flesh and blood,Our pastime and our happiness will grow.

When I’m 80 years old and sitting in my rocking chair, I’ll be reading Harry Potter. And my family will say to me, ‘After all this time?’ And I will say, ‘Always.

I never tire of reading Tom Paine.

You never know who you’re inspiring or uninspiring. People notice more than you think.

Reading makes me feel like I’ve lived a thousand lives in addition to my own.

His bedroom was a reflection of Bryant’s mind, its untidy shelves filled with games and puzzles stacked in ancient boxes, statues and mementoes competing for space with books on every subject imaginable, from Sensation and...

I started off for home, where I planned to recruit a good book and hide away from the world.

There is nothing more wonderful than a book. It may be a message to us from the dead, from human souls we never saw who lived perhaps thousands of miles away, and yet these little...

Lost in my dreams, I somehow cross at the traffic signals, bumping into street lamps or people, yet moving onward, exuding fumes of beer and grime, yet smiling, because my briefcase is full of books...

You tell a kid he doesn’t like to read, and he’ll believe you

A black boy brought Wilson’s gin and he sipped it very slowly because he had nothing else to do except to return to his hot and squalid room and read a novel – or a...

Art never responds to the wish to make it democratic; it is not for everybody; it is only for those who are willing to undergo the effort needed to understand it.

Both reading and writing are experiences–lifelong– in the course of which we who encounter words used in certain ways are persuaded by them to be brought mind and heart within the presence, the power, of...

When she thinks a book is very good, what she says to herself is: yes, that’s how things are. I hadn’t thought of it before, but that’s how things are.

It was the yearning she related to. Shriver seemed to understand the specific human pain of wanting and pushing away at the same time. It left her with a gorgeous ache, and when she turned...

I read,’ I say. ‘I study and read. I bet I’ve read everything you’ve read. Don’t think I haven’t. I consume libraries. I wear out spines and ROM drives. I do things like get in...

Books are an amazing thing. Anyone who thinks of them as an escape from reality or as something you should get your nose out of and go outside and play, or as merely a distraction...

Your words are powerful so what you say goes a long way to either establish or destroy you; this is why you should say things that God has said concerning you, not things that situations...

Reading… a vacation for the mind….

But the act of rereading contains profundities, and challenges, all its own. Going back to a book — sometimes the same physical copy of it — that you fell in love with years ago is...

Lectio, quae placuit, decies repetita placebit.(What we read with pleasure we can read many times with pleasure.)

What I like most about reading is I can read in minutes what it took the author hours to write. What I like most about writing is readers can read in minutes what it took...

She read and read and read, but she was stuffing herself with the letters on the page like an unhappy child stuffing itself with chocolate. They didn’t taste bad, but she was still unhappy.

Reading haiku is like viewing a photograph or a painting. A haiku is a moment of time, isolated, and held up for viewing.

‘Books had always been my best friends and all I wanted to do was lose myself in them, and better yet if the worlds and characters were of my own making.’

Do you want to die old and craven in your bed?- How else? Though not till I’m done reading.

The rumor is that my cousin dates phoenix sculptures made out of cheese. It has to be true, because it’s too weird not to be. Also, consider the evidence. He lives in Wisconsin and does...

I ask of literature precisely those things of which I feel the lack in my own life.

A romance book is designed to tell you something about love–its ability to endure, forgive, go the extra mile, care about someone, put someone else first.

This was the book I read over and over. I really felt so in tune with them- I knew all the dates of their lives, what they had been doing, whre they had been. They...

Dinosaurs didn’t read. Look what happened to them!

If a book is well written, I always find it too short.

The most essential and fundamental aspect of culture is the study of literature, since this is an education in how to picture and understand human situations.

The reader! You, dogged, uninsultable, print-oriented bastard, it’s you I’m addressing, who else, from inside this monstrous fiction. You’ve read me this far, then? Even this far? For what discreditable motive? How is it you...