“Give me books, French wine, fruit, fine weather and a little music played out of doors, played by somebody I do not know.”— John Keats, amazon.com
“When life wears us down, great fiction gives us back our human shape.”— Kevin Hartnett, themillions.com
“I believe we have an obligation to read for pleasure, in private and in public places. If we read for pleasure, if others see us reading, then we learn, we exercise our imaginations. We show others that reading is a good thing.”— Neil Gaiman, theguardian.com
“Every word leaves a memory in your heart – and it the sum of these memories that form sentences, paragraphs, books.”— Paulo Coelho, paulocoelhoblog.com
“In any case, rather like priests who have forgotten the meaning of the prayers they chant, we shall go on for quite a long time talking of books and writing books, pretending all the while not to notice that the church is empty and the parishioners have gone elsewhere to attend other gods, perhaps i…”— Gore Vidal, amazon.com
“Lonely children often have imaginary playmates but I was never lonely; rather, I was solitary, and wanted no company at all other than books and movies, and my own imagination.”— Gore Vidal, amazon.com
“They say in every library there is a single book that can answer the question that burns like a fire in the mind.”— Lemony Snicket, amazon.com
“How marvelous books are, crossing worlds and centuries, defeating ignorance and, finally, cruel time itself.”— Gore Vidal, amazon.com
“Books don’t change the world, people change the world, books only change people.”— Mario Quintana, goodreads.com
“For books are not absolutely dead things, but do contain a potency of life in them to be as active as that soul was whose progeny they are; nay, they do preserve as in a vial the purest efficacy and extraction of that living intellect that bred them.”— John Milton, amazon.com
“Books became her friends and there was one for every mood. There was poetry for quiet companionship. There was adventure when she tired of quiet hours. There would be love stories when she came into adolescence and when she wanted to feel a closeness to someone she could read a biography. On that da…”— Betty Smith, amazon.com
“Maybe this is why we read, and why in moments of darkness we return to books: to find words for what we already know.”— Alberto Manguel, amazon.com
“I kept always two books in my pocket, one to read, one to write in.”— Robert Louis Stevenson, amazon.com
“And when I was young, did I ever tell you, I always wanted to get inside a book and never come out again? I loved reading so much I wanted to be a part of it, and there were some books I could have stayed in for ever.”— Peter Ackroyd, amazon.com
“I often hear people say that they read to escape reality, but I believe that what they’re really doing is reading to find reason for hope, to find strength. While a bad book leaves readers with a sense of hopelessness and despair, a good novel, through stories of values realized, of wrongs righted,…”— Terry Goodkind, goodreads.com
“There is something delicious about writing the first words of a story. You never quite know where they'll take you.”— Beatrix Potter, amazon.com
“I was raised among books, making invisible friends in pages that seemed cast from dust and whose smell I carry on my hands to this day.”— Carlos Ruiz Zafon, Carlos Ruiz Zafon, amazon.com
“She had always wanted words, she loved them; grew up on them. Words gave her clarity, brought reason, shape.”— Michael Ondaatje, amazon.com