If you want to learn something, read a book. If you want to master something, write a book.
– David Pearlmutter
Bea says that the art of reading is slowly dying, that it’s an intimate ritual, that a book is a mirror that offers us only what we already carry inside us, that when we read, we do it with all our heart and mind, and great readers are becoming more scarce by the day.
– Carlos Ruiz Zafon
The only books that influence are those for which we are ready, and which have gone a little farther down our particular path than we have yet to go ourselves.
– E. M. Forster
Authors only begin books. Readers make them complete.
– Stephen Weeks
I declare after all there is no enjoyment like reading! How much sooner one tires of anything than of a book!
– Jane Austen
I like a thin book because it will steady a table, a leather volume because it will strop a razor, and a heavy book because it can be thrown at a cat.
– Mark Twain
Never read a book through merely because you have begun it.
– John Witherspoon
When you sell a man a book, you don’t sell him 12 ounces of paper and ink and glue – you sell him a whole new life.
– Christopher Morley
That is a good book which is opened with expectation and closed in profit.
– Amos Bronson Alcott
Reading good books ruins you for enjoying bad books.
– Mary Ann Shaffer and Annie Barrows
Perhaps there is some sort of secret homing instinct in books that brings them to their perfect readers.
– Mary Ann Shaffer and Annie Barrows
Miss a meal if you have to, but don’t miss a book.
– Jim Rohn
Where books are burned, in the end people will burn.
– Heinrich Heine
Each book is a continent, one with varied terrain, friendly or unfriendly animals and citizens; it might take days or weeks or even years to get to know the place and its complex customs.
– Susan Olding
Sometimes you read a book so special that you want to carry it around with you for months after you’ve finished just to stay near it.
– Markus Zusak
Picking five favourite books is like picking the five body parts you’d most like not to lose.
– Neil Gaiman
Books lie in wake for our readiness.
– Bruno Bettelheim
No book is the same twice.
– Patricia Volk
Everything in the world exists in order to end up as a book.
– Stéphane Mallarmé
Even a book can be dangerous in the wrong hands, and when that happens, you blame the hands, but you also read the book.
– Erika Johansen
Strange thoughts brew in your heart when you spend too much time with old books.
– Aravind Adiga
I advised you to dispose of your books, and advise it still. Be sure to do it, it will give you peace of mind. But at the same time be careful not to become narrow-minded, or afraid of reading what is well written, quite the contrary, such writings are a source of comfort in life.
– Vincent van Gogh
The pleasure of all reading is doubled when one lives with another who shares the same books.
– Katherine Mansfield
In the beginning I was just giving books away. I got a new book, I gave away an old one. I always keep just seven. But then I began to find that others were leaving books where I had left mine and I thought, these are for me. So now I replenish my library with the random gifts of unknown strangers and I never know what I will read next.
– Salman Rushdie
What a miracle it is that out of these small, flat, rigid squares of paper unfolds world after world after world, worlds that sing to you, comfort and quiet or excite you. Books help us understand who we are and how we are to behave. They show us what community and friendship mean; they show us how to live and die.
– Anne Lamott
All the computer can give you is a manuscript. People don’t want to read manuscripts. They want to read books. Books smell good. They look good. You can press it to your bosom. You can carry it in your pocket.
– Ray Bradbury
In my view, nineteen pounds of old books are at least nineteen times as delicious as one pound of fresh caviar.
– Anne Fadiman
Every book, every volume you see here, has a soul. The soul of the person who wrote it and of those who read it and lived and dreamed with it. Every time a book changes hands, every time someone runs his eyes down its pages, its spirit grows and strengthens.
– Carlos Ruíz Zafón
Reality has become much scarier than any, even tasteless, imagination. And it should be shown that way. The human soul is measured to its full extent, and such that the world did not even suspect. Books and films about our truth, about our people must crackle with horror, suffering, anger and the unheard-of power of the human spirit.
Cruelty and universal stupidity, dressing in atavistic feathers, glorified by millennia of bookish lies and bloodthirsty stupidity, turn me into something worse, stupider and more terrible than a wild beast. I am not talking about such noble and respectable animals as a dog, horse or cow.
— Oleksandr Dovzhenko