Reading books in one's youth is like looking at the moon through a crevice; reading books in middle age is like looking at the moon in one's courtyard; and reading books in old age is like looking at the moon on an open terrace.
Bessie asked if I would have a book: the word book acted as a transient stimulus, and I begged her to fetch Gulliver’s Travels from the library. This book I had again and again perused with delight.
...the reader who plucks a book from her shelf only once is as deprived as the listener who, after attending a single performance of a Beethoven symphony, never hears it again.
I love books. I’m giving some hard copies of the Sacerdos Mysteries book away because I think there’s something so brilliant about them. The digitisation trend is the future but people will still want the feel and smell of real books.
Do the children who prefer books set in the real, ordinary, workaday world ever read as obsessively as those who would much rather be transported into other worlds entirely?
I think the influence of books is neither direct and more predictable. Books themselves are too unruly, and so are readers.
I shake my head. "Not my kind of scene. I'd rather be home with my book boyfriend." "I'll never get what you book sluts get out of a fictional man…" He shakes his head. "Boys in books are better.
The only book I’d read in the shower is Naked Lunch, because my bathtub is in the center of my kitchen. I make breakfast like I make love, and sometimes I’m so hungry I make if for three people.
I think a great book title would be “Ida Says ‘I do’ in Idaho.” It would be about a divorce in Washington State, and the protagonist would be a woman, though I’m not sure what her name should be.
This book does not exist. And if that doesn’t deter you from buying it, then I’m also selling frozen alien flesh, a patch of Bigfoot’s fur, and a patch of land on Pluto (limit one per customer).
If books could have more, give more, be more, show more, they would still need readers who bring to them sound and smell and light and all the rest that can’t be in books. The book needs you.
My platform has been to reach reluctant readers. And one of the best ways I found to motivate them is to connect them with reading that interests them, to expand the definition of reading to include humor, science fiction/fantasy, nonfiction, graphic...
I do send out information about my books. Very few people buy the books that way, but I always feel that if they want to know more about the process, they can get the information from my books.
In books I meet the dead as if they were alive, in books I see what is yet to come... All things decay and pass with time... all fame would fall victim to oblivion if God had not given mortal men the book to aid them.
I was that kid with the glasses and the hungry expression who haunted every library book sale and used bookstore in town: the one who always has a book in one hand and is reaching for the next book with the other. There's one in every town.
It's a symbiotic process, writing. What I am makes the books—not part of me, all of me—and then the books themselves inform the sense of what I am. So the more I can be, the better the books will be.
I was 8 years old when I went across the street from my house to a fair, and they always had a used book sale. For a quarter I bought a book called 'Come On Seabiscuit.' I loved that book. It stayed with me all those years.
I was unhappy for a long time, and very lonesome, living with my grandmother. Then it was that books began to happen to me, and I began to believe in nothing but books and the wonderful world in books — where if people suffered, they suffered in be...
I often write two books simultaneously. Usually one of them starts out as a fun experiment designed to give me a daily break from the real book I'm writing. And then that becomes a real book too.
If I pick up a book with vampires on the cover, I want there to be vampires. If I pick up a book with spaceships on the cover, I want spaceships. If I see one with dragons, I want there to be dragons inside the book. Proper labeling. Ethical labeling...
I read a lot of books about psychopaths. I read a wonderful book Amy Hempel gave me about the guy who created criminal profiling - a fascinating book, 'Mind Hunter.'
