Persons attempting to find a motive in this narrative will be prosecuted; persons attempting to find a moral in it will be banished; persons attempting to find a plot in it will be shot.BY ORDER...

How do you press a wildflower into the pages of an e-book?

Yet the experience of reading a novel has certain qualities that remind us of the traditional apprehension of mythology. It can be seen as a form of meditation. Readers have to live with a novel...

People with Books. What, in 2007, could be more incongruous than that? It makes me want to laugh.”[Afterword]

I bought you something” Willows blurts out.”You bought…What?”Willow closes her eyes for a second. She’s a little surprised she’s going to give it to him after all, but there’s no going back now. She has...

The American writer and dilettante Logan Pearsall Smith once said: ‘Some people think that life is the thing; but I prefer reading.’ When I first came across this, I thought it witty; now I find...

My little circle of friends know how twisted my brain is. I’m constantly reading and people always think, ‘Ah, we didn’t know that about you’, but that’s part of my charm.

There is only one genre in fiction, the genre is called book.

It is better to read one intellectually challenging book every 12 months … than to read 12 entertaining books every month.

The books that the world calls immoral are books that show the world its own shame.

You get a little moody sometimes but I think that’s because you like to read. People that like to read are always a little fucked up.

I was a hugely unchaperoned reader, and I would wander into my local public library and there sat the world, waiting for me to look at it, to find out about it, to discover who...

Reading, for me, is like this: consumptive, pleasing, calming, as much as edifying. It’s how I feel after a good dinner. That’s why I do it so often: It feels wonderful. The book is mind...

I regained my soul through literature after those times I’d lost it to wild-eyed gypsy girls on the European streets.

Books,’ I say sleepily. ‘They don’t change either. If you read a book and look at it again later on, it’s still the same thing. But it’s exciting all over again.

Libraries raised me.

The unification of worlds is an author’s priority, as one of them surely resides forbidden to the public.

When a new book is published, read an old one.

Montesquieu wrote: “I have never known any distress that an hour of reading did not relieve.” If one substituted the word music for reading, the exact same dictum applied to me.

Being a reader has brought me much joy, laughter, and rich experience. But reading has also wounded me. The sacrament of reading has plowed me open and sown seeds of empathy that have taken root...

In our land of opportunities and distractions, it’s hard to devote our attention to the quiet pleasures of reading. It’s as if we live our lives in a noisy restaurant and can’t have the intimate...

The music of revelation announces itself to the reader in somber brooding tones or in melodies light as air and one is invited to dance with the most captivating of partners: poetry.

That’s what sofas are for: sit down, drink a cup of tea, talk of literature. At least that’s how I see it.

Oh, magic hour when a child first knows it can read printed words! For quite a while, Francie had been spelling out letters, sounding them and then putting the sounds together to mean a word....

There are two types of dreams: the ones that come true and the ones that pass through

It is very rarely that a middle-aged man finds an author who gives him, what he knew so often in his teens and twenties, the sense of having opened a new door.

Listening is not waiting for your turn to talk

The 1920s was a great time for reading altogether, very possibly the peak decade for reading in American life. Soon it would be overtaken by the passive distraction of radio, but for the moment reading...

Books are a uniquely portable magic.

At one magical instant in your early childhood, the page of a book—that string of confused, alien ciphers—shivered into meaning. Words spoke to you, gave up their secrets; at that moment, whole universes opened. You...

The detective story is the normal recreation of noble minds.

the joy of someone who had been a reader all her life, whose world had been immeasurably enlarged by the words of others.

I write almost always in the third person, and I don’t think the narrator is male or female anyway. They’re both, and young and old, and wise and silly, and sceptical and credulous, and innocent...

Human contacts have been so highly valued in the past only because reading was not a common accomplishment and because books were scarce and difficult to reproduce…As reading becomes more and more habitual and widespread,...

A fine gentleman like that, they said, had no need of books. Let him leave books, they said, to the palsied or the dying. But worse was to come. For once the disease of reading...

Novels institutionalize the ruse of eros. It becomes a narrative texture of sustained incongruence, emotional and cognitive. It permits the reader to stand in triangular relation to the characters in the story and reach into...

…there are pleasures to be had from books beyond being lightly entertained. There is the pleasure of being challenged; the pleasure of feeling one’s range and capacities expanding; the pleasure of entering into an unfamiliar...

Just as an apple a day keeps the doctor away,a book a week keeps the mind ever sleek

We have more choice than ever before about where and how we buy and read books.

You read a lot?” Galina finally asked.”Yes. It’s an escape into another world.” She tried to keep her words light instead of sad, thoughts of her family in her head. “Sometimes that is the best...

I’d like my readers to feel they want to follow my characters off the page at the end of the book.

It was an emergency!” Seth blurted. “Read my lips – emergency reading – not some demented idea of fun. If I was starving, I would eat asparagus. If somebody held a gun to my head,...

We are absurdly accustomed to the miracle of a few written signs being able to contain immortal imagery, involutions of thought, new worlds with live people, speaking, weeping, laughing. We take it for granted so...

The place trembled with sound. I didn’t need to do anything. They would do it all. But you had to be careful. Drunk as they were they could immediately detect any false gesture, any false...

The books we love offer a sketch of a whole universe that we secretly inhabit, and in which we desire the other person to assume a role.One of the conditions of happy romantic compatibility is,...

Hikayatin mo lahat ng kakilala mo na magkaroon ng kahit isa man lang paboritong libro sa buhay nila. Dahil wala nang mas kawawa pa sa mga taong literado pero hindi nagbabasa.

It is just as honorable. . .to dig in the dirt as to dig into books. The mind can do its best work only when th body has been developed equally well.

Reading is poor man’s way of travelling not just around the world but into the minds of people.

Interest is never enough. If it doesn’t haunt you, you’ll never write it well. What haunts and obsesses you may, with luck and labour, interest your readers. What merely interests you is sure to bore...

Geeks are not the world’s rowdiest people. We’re quiet and introspective, and usually more comfortable communing with our keyboards or a good book than each other. Our idea of how to paint theEmerald City red...