Fiction allows us to slide into these other heads, these other places, and look out through other eyes. And then in the tale we stop before we die, or we die vicariously and unharmed, and in the world beyond the tale we turn the page or close the book, and we resume our lives.
To know a man’s library is, in some measure, to know a man’s mind.
I know there are people who don’t read fiction at all, and I find it hard to understand how they can bear to be inside the same head all the time.
How many a man has dated a new era in his life from the reading of a book.
We may sit in our library and yet be in all quarters of the earth.
There is something wonderful about a book. We can pick it up. We can heft it. We can read it. We can set it down. We can think of what we have read. It does something for us. We can share great minds, great actions, and great undertakings in the pages of a book.
I’m old-fashioned and think that reading books is the most glorious pastime that humankind has yet devised.
Deprived of their newspapers or a novel, reading-addicts will fall back onto cookery books, on the literature which is wrapped around bottles of patent medicine, on those instructions for keeping the contents crisp which are printed on the outside of boxes of breakfast cereals. On anything.
Reading is a basic tool in the living of a good life.
Of all things, I liked books best.
Reading is an intelligent way of not having to think.
I think reading is a gift. It was a gift that was given to me as a child by many people, and now as an adult and a writer, I’m trying to give a little of it back to others. It’s one of the greatest pleasures I know.
You need to read more science fiction. Nobody who reads science fiction comes out with this crap about the end of history.
There’s a difference between preferring books to parties and preferring sixteen cats to seeing the light of day.
For me to see is to read. It has always been that way.
If you love books enough, books will love you back.
I don’t believe one reads to escape reality. A person reads to confirm a reality he knows is there, but which he has not experienced.
Don’t blow off another’s candle for it won’t make yours shine brighter.
May I suggest that you all read? And often. Believe me, it’s nice to have something to talk about other than the weather and the Queen’s health. Your mind is not a cage. It’s a garden. And it requires cultivating.
Each book was a world unto itself, and in it I took refuge.