In fiction, the characters have their own lives. They may start as a gloss on the author’s life, but they move on from there. In poetry, especially confessional poetry but in other poetry as well,...

I learned to be a regional writer by reading people like Flannery O’Connor. She was a huge influence.

Why does it scare me to think I might be ordinary? I remember when I started first grade and I could hardly pay attention for fear I wouldn’t learn to read and write. I didn’t...

A big book is like a serious relationship; it requires a commitment. Not only that, but there’s no guarantee that you will enjoy it, or that it will have a happy ending. Kind of like...

I don’t know what people should be reading. Only you know what you should be reading.

Let’s be reasonable and add an eighth day to the week that is devoted exclusively to reading.

Reading enables me to maintain a sense of something substantive– my ethical integrity, my intellectual integrity.

Literature is the human activity that takes the fullest and most precise account of variousness, possibility, complexity, and difficulty.

Reading is a basic tool in the living of a good life.

We don’t want to feel less when we have finished a book; we want to feel that new possibilities of being have been opened to us. We don’t want to close a book with a...

Libraries allow children to ask questions about the world and find the answers. And the wonderful thing is that once a child learns to use a library, the doors to learning are always open.

She is too fond of books, and it has turned her brain

Buying a book is not about obtaining a possession, but about securing a portal.

I love staring at my books for hours just trying to decide which book to read next. Doing that is almost as fun as actually reading them.

As long as reading is for us the instigator whose magic keys have opened the door to those dwelling-places deep within us that we would not have known how to enter, its role in our...

We would be worse than we are without the good books we have read, more conformist, not as restless, more submissive, and the critical spirit, the engine of progress, would not even exist. Like writing,...

There’s a difference between preferring books to parties and preferring sixteen cats to seeing the light of day.

I am eternally grateful for my knack of finding in great books, some of them very funny books, reason enough to feel honored to be alive, no matter what else might be going on.

There is a somewhat time-worn joke about people taking up library work because they like to read : the joke consisting of the fact that librarians have so little time to read. But, I tell...

Read widely and with discrimination. Bad writing is contagious.

Books are not absolutely dead things, but do contain a potency of life in them to be as active as that soul was whose progeny they are; nay they do preserve as in a vial...

A book is a place where my reality, escapism, hope, despair, love and death lie.

I love stories – devising them, writing them, reading them, watching them, being a part of them.

I love reading. It gives me somewhere to be, somewhere to be accepted and somewhere to be found. But most of all, it’s because I don’t want to face reality. And who would? Not me!...

Reading is a solitary pursuit, even a lone passage to a separate world. Yet to read in public, amid strangers, gives it another dimension. Sometimes the city speaks to the page, or the page seems...

Philosophy is to a thinker … what push-ups are to a model.

It is what you read when you don’t have to that determines what you will be when you can’t help it.

Some printed pages are medical plasters to extract pain, others are tourists’ tickets out of boredom or loneliness to exhilarating adventures, still others are diplomas for promotion and drilling ideas into a quick-step.

Life is a book that someone else is reading—and you, a key character—hencethe need for continual conflict and resolution. We can’t have any boring books.

Reading is an activity of civilized beings.

A good novel, one which entices the author as much as it beckons the reader.

Doctor Who: You want weapons? We’re in a library. Books are the best weapon in the world. This room’s the greatest arsenal we could have. Arm yourself!(from Tooth and Claw in Season 2)

I ate them like salad, books were my sandwich for lunch, my tiffin and dinner and midnight munch. I tore out the pages, ate them with salt, doused them with relish, gnawed on the bindings,...

Some say life is the thing, but I prefer reading.

Reading is a gift. It’s something you can do almost anytime and anywhere. It can be a tremendous way to learn, relax, and even escape. So, enough about the virtues of reading. Time to read...

Not one-tenth of them. I don’t suppose you use your Sevres china every day?

If you want to see and feel magic first hand, read a book to your kid before bedtime. —Richard Due

One of the powerful functions of a library — any library — lies in its ability to take us away from worlds that are familiar and comfortable and into ones which we can neither predict...

When a reader enters the pages of a book of poetry, he or she enters a world where dreams transform the past into knowledge made applicable to the present, and where visions shape the present...

Book and reader, if they meet up at the right moment, it can make sparks fly, set you alight, change your life. It can, I promise you.

Somebody who only reads newspapers and at best books of contemporary authors looks to me like an extremely near-sighted person who scorns eyeglasses. He is completely dependent on the prejudices and fashions of his times,...

When I flick through a family album, I see that people don’t die, they just become photographs

He does not despise real woods because he has read of enchanted woods; the reading makes all real woods a little enchanted.

Imbalanced reactions are discreet indicators of previous scars

Each of them has only one moment, a moment when it soars screaming like the phoenix, all its pages aflame. For that single moment we love them ever after, although they soon turn to ashes.

I really think that reading a whole script is kind of prying and neurotic, don’t you?

Books may not change our suffering, books may not protect us from evil, books may not tell us what is good or what is beautiful, and they will certainly not shield us from the common...

Just as pilots gain practice with flight simulators, people might acquire social experience by reading fiction.

Books are the plane, and the train, and the road. They are the destination, and the journey. They are home.

An editor doesn’t just read, he reads well, and reading well is a creative, powerful act. The ancients knew this and it frightened them. Mesopotamian society, for instance, did not want great reading from its...