For twenty years I strove to free myself from what I retained of my education; I indulged my curiosity by reading books less to learn than to efface from my memory the ideas that had...

Do not read, as children do, to amuse yourself, or like the ambitious, for the purpose of instruction. No, read in order to live.

History is not the story of heroes entirely. It is often the story of cruelty and injustice and shortsightedness. There are monsters, there is evil, there is betrayal. That’s why people should read Shakespeare and...

But the not-very-highbrow truth of the matter was that the reading was how I got my ya-yas out.For the sake of my bookish reputation I upgraded to Tolstoy and Steinbeck before I understood them, but...

Reading is a collaboration between the writer and reader. Both parties must keep that in mind when dealing with a work of fiction.”{Guy Gavriel Kay}

We only pass this way once..unless our significant other is reading the map..

For some, perhaps for many, books are spare time. For me, the rest of life is spare time: I wake and sleep language. It has always been so.

Responding to a moderator at the Sydney Writers Festival in 2008 (video), about the Spanish words in his book:When all of us are communicating and talking when we’re out in the world, we’ll be lucky...

Want to inspire your kids to read more? Try giving them kids some money to spend just on a book. Take them to a bookstore and let them browse and pick out one book that...

Books can’t hurt you, if you don’t read them.

I’m so glad I have my own copy. I can read them again and again. I can read them again and again on trains, all my life, and every time I do I’ll remember today...

There are two kinds of books in the world–the boring kind they make you read in school and the interesting kind that they won’t let you read in school because then they would have to...

Do you like reading? It’s the best thing that can happen to you in life. Writing has other implications.

Thank you for sending me a copy of your book – I’ll waste no time reading it.

Reading good books ruins you for enjoying bad books.

Childhood reading is so important.

I just loved making words into stories by the sound of my voice.

If we weigh the significance of a book by the effect it has on its readers, then the great children’s books suddenly turn up very high on the list.

Poetry is not for profit. Poetry is for Posterity.

On no days of our childhood did we live so fully perhaps as those we thought we had left behind without living them, those that we spent with a favourite book.

We invent fictions in order to live somehow the many lives we would like to lead when we barely have one at our disposal.

Read things you’re sure will disagree with your current thinking. If you’re a die-hard anti-animal person, read Meat. If you’re a die-hard global warming advocate, read Glenn Beck. If you’re a Rush Limbaugh fan, read...

Reading a novel, War and Peace for example, is no Catnap. Because a novel is so long, reading one is like being married forever to somebody nobody knows or cares about.

When at last I came upon the right book, the feeling was violent: it blew open a hole in me that made life more dangerous because I couldn’t control what came through it.

Cirocco liked space, reading, and sex, not necessarily in that order. She had never been able to satisfactorily combine all three, but two was not bad.

I have dreamed of that song, of the strange words to that simple rhyme-song, and on several occasions I have understood what she was saying, in my dreams. In those dreams I spoke that language...

I’m always amazed at friends who say they try to read at night in bed but always end up falling asleep. I have the opposite problem. If a book is good I can’t go to...

But at other times, I sit here reading in the afternoon, a myrtle in my buttonhole, and there are such beautiful passages in the book that I think I have become beautiful myself.

Ocean waves gently rock the boat,As if to the tune of a lullaby.She sits still as the boat silently floatsUnder the infinite blue sky.

I have a passion for teaching kids to become readers, to become comfortable with a book, not daunted. Books shouldn’t be daunting, they should be funny, exciting and wonderful; and learning to be a reader...

No. I can survive well enough on my own— if given the proper reading material.

Here’s what I love: when a great writer turns me into a Jew from Chicago, a lesbian out of South Carolina, or a black woman moving into a subway entrance in Harlem. Turn me into...

That life can be a rich place, comprised of the highbrow and the lowdown, the casual and the ambitious, private reading and public sharing. As a parent in that landscape, you’ll need to be sometimes...

For this quiet, unprepossessing, passive man who has no garden in front of his subsidised flat, books are like flowers. He loves to line them up on the shelf in multicoloured rows: he watches over...

There was one sure way to avoid being assigned an impromptu chore in our house – be it taking out the trash or cleaning your room – and that was to have your face buried...

All libraries must submit to a certain order, I answered. Indeed, agreed the professor, or all will be lost. The fall of nations and empires begins with the fall of libraries.

The reason a writer writes a book is to forget a book and the reason a reader reads one is to remember it.

Having come to the conclusion that there was so much to do that she didn’t know where to start, Mrs Fowler decided not to start at all. She went to the library, took Diary of...

I believe we do well to fall asleep each night with books. We enter the library of our dreams in good company then.

Reading is not optional.

Reading is an intelligent way of not having to think.

Lying eats into the soul. If it becomes a habit it frays the edge of your spirit. Truth telling, although sometimes harder to do, strengthens your heart. It serves a person ill not to tell...

The rage for swiftness which is so characteristic of this restless time has been extended to fashions of reading. One effect of the modern habit of swift and careless reading is seen in the impatience...

He that loves reading has everything within his reach.

Reading not only soothes your soul but takes you through a garden of imagination

Life is like a mute tutor: it teaches by showing what we call fate

He may really have been enjoying an embryonic composition of his own stimulated by mere hints in the book.

Anger is like a creeper vine that strangles the tree on which it grows

The problem with books is that they end.

A book is like a pump. It gives nothing unless first you give to it. You prime a pump with your own water, you work the handle with your own strength. You do this because...