Naked Lunch” that day, but the cafeteria served us all clothing. I like my meals a little more scandalous. I should eat in the library, along with the other gluttonous nudists.

Denn ich ohne Bücher bin nicht ich.

Readers are plentiful; thinkers are rare.

They were…no ordinary group, gathering together to kill an evening, to seek refuge from critical husbands and demanding children while idly discussing their new best-seller. They met because literature was their shared passion. Books were...

To feel most beautifully alive means to be reading something beautiful, ready always to apprehend in the flow of language the sudden flash of poetry.

… and because they were fond of reading, she fancied them satirical: perhaps without exactly knowing what it was to be satirical; but that did not signify. It was censure in common use, and easily...

While the consequences are often quite hellish, I am absolutely and perhaps permanently against ignoring books recommended from the heart by very nice people and strangers; it is too risky and inhuman; also the consequences...

If you read a story that really involves you, your body will tell you that you are living through the experience. You will recognize feelings that have physical signs – increased heart rate, sweaty palms,...

My Alma mater is the Chicago Public Library.

The poem or the discovery exists in two moments of vision: the moment of appreciation as much as that of creation; for the appreciator must see the movement, wake to the echo which was started...

I look forward all day to evening, and then I put an “engaged” on the door and get into my nice red bath robe and furry slippers and pile all the cushions behind me on...

The more a book is like an opium pipe, the more the Chinaman reader is satisfied with it and tends to discuss the quality of the drug rather than its lethargic effects.

I go on writing so that I will always have something to read.

My books are a word feast.

Books are my greatest treasure.

No matter who you are, no matter where you live, and no matter how many people are chasing you, what you don’t read is often as important as what you do read.

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!

He couldn’t have known it, but among the original run of The History of Love, at least one copy was destined to change a life.This particular book was one of the last of the two...

What occurs to people when they read Kurt [Vonnegut] is that things are much more up for grabs than they thought they were. The world is a slightly different place just because they read a...

[D]on’t ever apologize to an author for buying something in paperback, or taking it out from a library (that’s what they’re there for. Use your library). Don’t apologize to this author for buying books second...

Collect books, even if you don’t plan on reading them right away. Nothing is more important than an unread library.

The English major is, first of all, a reader. She’s got a book pup-tented in front of her nose many hours a day; her Kindle glows softly late into the night. But there are readers...

Reading is to the mind what exercise is to the body.

As night falls silently all around,She carefully turns the last page.

The books transported her into new worlds and introduced her to amazing people who lived exciting lives. She went on olden-day sailing ships with Joseph Conrad. She went to Africa with Ernest Hemingway and to...

One can’t prescribe books, even the best books, to people unless one knows a good deal about each individual person. If a man is keen on reading, I think he ought to open his mind...

She had a grocer’s faith in books; they can be handed out like Green Stamps and were redeemable for a variety of useful gifts.

Don’t read a book to let the time pass…let the time pass to read a book.

Reading is escape, and the opposite of escape; it’s a way to make contact with reality after a day of making things up, and it’s a way of making contact with someone else’s imagination after...

She seemed to think reading was some sort of hobby, as opposed to being as necessary as breathing, sleeping, and eating.

He loved books; books are cold but safe friends.

The thought of these vast stacks of books would drive him mad: the more he read, the less he seemed to know — the greater the number of the books he read, the greater the...

Good characters make you feel like you have new friends, don’t they? You have to re-read the books just to visit with them again. Grace Awakening. Book one: Awakening Dreams

If the novel is dead, I’m a necrophiliac.

How the excitement comes upon me to tell it all! In the quest of writing, the heart can speed up with anticipation–as it does, indeed, during the chase itself of whales. I can swear it,...

Lest soviel ihr könnt! Lest Straßenschilder und Speisekarten, lest die Anschläge im Bürgermeisteramt, lest von mir aus Schundliteratur – aber lest! Lest! Sonst seid ihr verloren!

I feel free and strong. If I were not a reader of books I could not feel this way. Whatever may happen to me, thank God that I can read, that I have truly touched...

In my contact with people, I find that, as a rule, it is only the little, narrow people who live for themselves, who never read good books, who do not travel, who never open up...