If you don't have time to read, you don't have the time (or the tools) to write. Simple as that.
You don't have to burn books to destroy a culture. Just get people to stop reading them.
Do not read, as children do, to amuse yourself, or like the ambitious, for the purpose of instruction. No, read in order to live.
Sleep is good, he said, and books are better.
Some books should be tasted, some devoured, but only a few should be chewed and digested thoroughly.
Let us read, and let us dance; these two amusements will never do any harm to the world.
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.
Think before you speak. Read before you think.
You think your pain and your heartbreak are unprecedented in the history of the world, but then you read. It was books that taught me that the things that tormented me most were the very things that connected me with all the people who were alive, who had ever been alive.
Either write something worth reading or do something worth writing.
Read, read, read. Read everything -- trash, classics, good and bad, and see how they do it. Just like a carpenter who works as an apprentice and studies the master. Read! You'll absorb it. Then write. If it's good, you'll find out. If it's not, throw it out of the window.
No tears in the writer, no tears in the reader. No surprise in the writer, no surprise in the reader.
Many people, myself among them, feel better at the mere sight of a book.
I spent my life folded between the pages of books. In the absence of human relationships I formed bonds with paper characters. I lived love and loss through stories threaded in history; I experienced adolescence by association. My world is one interwoven web of words, stringing limb to limb, bone to sinew, thoughts and images all together. I am a being comprised of letters, a character created by sentences, a figment of imagination formed through fiction.
Reader's Bill of Rights 1. The right to not read 2. The right to skip pages 3. The right to not finish 4. The right to reread 5. The right to read anything 6. The right to escapism 7. The right to read anywhere 8. The right to browse 9. The right to read out loud 10. The right to not defend your tastes
There are worse crimes than burning books. One of them is not reading them.
Books are mirrors: you only see in them what you already have inside you.
Those who find ugly meanings in beautiful things are corrupt without being charming. This is a fault. Those who find beautiful meanings in beautiful things are the cultivated. For these there is hope. They are the elect to whom beautiful things mean only Beauty. There is no such thing as a moral or an immoral book. Books are well written, or badly written. That is all.
Reading was my escape and my comfort, my consolation, my stimulant of choice: reading for the pure pleasure of it, for the beautiful stillness that surrounds you when you hear an author's words reverberating in your head.
No book is really worth reading at the age of ten which is not equally – and often far more – worth reading at the age of fifty and beyond.
