A book series is never truly over. The story lives on, even when the final page has been turned.

But what I hope for in a book – either one that I write or one that I read – is transparency. I want the story to shine through. I don’t want to think of...

Flow is something the reader experiences, not the writer.

Novels and gardens,” she says. “I like to move from plot to plot.

Insensibly he formed the most delightful habit in the world, the habit of reading: he did not know that thus he was providing himself with a refuge from all the distress of life; he did...

Through books I discovered everything to be loved, explored, visited, communed with. I was enriched and given all the blueprints to a marvelous life, I was consoled in adversity, I was prepared for both joys...

Bill Gates (and his successor at Microsoft, Ray Ozzie) are famous for taking annual reading vacations. During the year they deliberately cultivate a stack of reading material—much of it unrelated to their day-to-day focus at...

Reading a book is a silent conversation between two friends.

It is well known that reading quickens the growth of a heart like nothing else.

Un libro leído a medias es una aventura amorosa incompleta.

the day women are allowed to learn to read and write the world will become ungovernable.

And every writer cherishes the dream of setting the young on fire, even if only by a cigarette butt tossed casually over the shoulder, and when we meet young people who say that they were...

yet you cannot help but love them.

Why is any one book different from any other book? They are different, A.J. decides, because they are. We have to look inside many. We have to believe. We agree to be disappointed sometimes so...

He read it over twenty times and though the darkness that sang on held steady about him, the unhurried words fell bright through his mind, going down golden through deep water, and when one passed...

Mr Earbrass was virtually asleep when several lines of verse passed through his mind and left it hopelessly awake. Here was the perfect epigraph for TUH:A horrid ?monster has been [something] delay’dBy your/their indiff’rence in...

I wanted to read immediately. The only fear was that of books coming to an end.

It was spring when it happened and the schoolroom windows were open all day long, and every afternoon after Billy left we had milk from little waxy cartons and Mrs. Jansma would read us chapters...

I think, because I’ve been working for a while, I’ve been working since I was ten, I had the fortune of reading a lot, a lot of scripts.

It’s not what you lift, it’s where you carry it.

Reading is not as insignificant as we claim. First we must steal the key to the library. Reading is a provocation, a rebellion: we open the book’s door, pretending it is a simple paperback cover,...

Don’t let any situation intimidate you anymore, don’t accept defeat anymore.

I turned down the first script offered to me, and the second. I lay on my back one day under an umbrella, in the garden, reading the third, and wondered why I had turned down...

Before you sleep, read something that is exquisite, and worth remembering.

The church trembled and the hail hammered the roof, but his words glided in the air, joyful and bright like the birds at the cliffs. They floated freely around one another without colliding and the...

So you went from one reader to two readers?” you’d be absolutely correct. And after I had congratulated you on your keen guess, I’d thank you for being 50% of my reading base.

Look at your daughter,’ she whispered. ‘As brave as…as..” She wanted to compare Meggie to a hero in some story but all the heroes she could think of were men, and anyway none of them...

The best books… are those that tell you what you know already.

What’s the point of a houseful of books you’ve already read?

And if I’m guilty of having gratuitous sex, then I’m also guilty of having gratuitous violence, and gratuitous feasting, and gratuitous description of clothes, and gratuitous heraldry, because very little of this is necessary to...

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...