{...} he made it a rule never to touch a book by any author who had not been dead at least 30 years.That's the only kind of book I can trust, he said.It's not that I don't believe in contemporary...

That's what books are for, to travel without moving an inch.

Surely we all occasionally buy books because of a daydream we're having--a little fantasy about the people we might turn into one day, when our lives are different, quieter, more introspective, and...

I don't mind nothing happening in a book, but nothing happening in a phony way--characters saying things people never say, doing jobs that don't fit, the whole works--is simply asking too much of a...

We are never allowed to forget that some books are badly written; we should remember that sometimes they're badly read, too.

I would like my personal reading map to resemble a map of the British Empire circa 1900.

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 loves books, and I'm...

Fortunately, I read {the books} without knowing what I was in for, and the best thing that can ever happen to a reader happened to me: I loved something that, by conviction {or by my nature} I should...

Today each of you is the object of the other's reading, one reads in the other the unwritten story.

If one wanted to depict the whole thing graphically, every episode, with its climax, would require a three-dimensional, or, rather, no model: every experience is unrepeatable. What makes lovemaking...

People sometimes act as though owning books you haven't read constitutes a charade or pretense, but for me, there's a lovely mystery and pregnancy about a book that hasn't given itself over to you...

Beware of books. They are more than innocent assemblages of paper and ink and string and glue. If they are any good, they have the spirit of the author within. Authors are rogues and ruffians and easy...

I rushed to the living room to protect myself from I don't know what, behind my best friend, a book.

When I read a book, I put in all the imagination I can, so that it is almost like writing the book as well as reading it - or rather, it is like living it. It makes reading so much more exciting, but...

Now I say, ”said Don Quijote to this season," that she reads a lot and goes a lot and she knows a lot.

It is, therefore, to know that this above -mentioned Hidalgo, the times that was idle, that were the most of the year, was read.

Back at home they drew the curtains and read, with disapproval, with relish, with avidity and glee - even the ones who'd never thought of opening a novel before. There's nothing like a shovelful of...

Books are like truth serum-- if you don't read, you can't figure out what's real.

Great land of sublimated things, thou World of Books, happy asyluum, refreshment and refuge from the world of everyday! . . .

She probably had her nose stuck in a book, living in a pretend fantasy world while I was actually out there living in the real fantasy world.

We read privately, mentally listening to the writer's voice and translating the writer's thoughts. The book remains static and fixed; the reader journeys through it. Picking up the book in the first...

The modern idea of testing a reader's "comprehension," as distinct from something else a reader may be doing, would have seemed an absurdity in 1790 or 1830 or 1860. What else was reading but...

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

Had I been able to formulate my first impressions of the United States, I might have said that there was a place in America called Kansas, where people could find a magic land at the heart of a...

And even with the book closed, the voices do not stop--there are echoes and reverberations that seem to leap off the pages and mischievously leave the novel tingling in our ears.

I explained that most great works of the imagination were meant to make you feel like a stranger in your own home. The best fiction always forced us to question what we took for granted. It questioned...

Jefferson, who spent his life collecting books, many of which he donated to the Library of Congress, boasted that America was the only country whose farmers read Homer. A native of America who cannot...

Do not, under any circumstances, belittle a work of fiction by trying to turn it into a carbon copy of real life; what we search for in fiction is not so much reality but the epiphany of truth.

She had her addictions and one of them was reading.

Reading in Egypt is cheap and will not develop until you believe that reading is a vital necessity