“There are two motives for reading a book: one, that you enjoy it; the other, that you can boast about it.”

“Some books you read. Some books you enjoy. But some books just swallow you up, heart and soul.”

Joanne Harris (1964) British author

“Nobody has to read this book. Nobody has to pick it up. Nobody has to open it. And if they open it and read it, they don't have to like it. And if you read it and you dislike it, you don't have to remain silent about it. You can write to me, you can complain about it, you can write to the publisher, you can write to the papers, you can write your own book. You can do all those things, but there your rights stop. No one has the right to stop me writing this book. No one has the right to stop it being published, or sold, or bought, or read.”

Philip Pullman book The Good Man Jesus and the Scoundrel Christ

“Let others pride themselves about how many pages they have written; I'd rather boast about the ones I've read.”

Jorge Luis Borges (1899–1986) Argentine short-story writer, essayist, poet and translator, and a key figure in Spanish language literature

“Indian reviewers don’t read books. They have two days to produce 800 words. They read the prologue and then skim a few pages, then they read all the other reviews. If the first two are negative, you can be sure they will all be negative. If the first two are good, the rest will be good. It’s that low-level, that pathetic. It takes a kind of confidence for a reviewer to have their own opinion about a book. And a lot of people here just don’t care about literary novels.”

Jeet Thayil (1959) Indian writer

“Woe to the book you can read without constantly wondering about the author!”

Emil M. Cioran (1911–1995) Romanian philosopher and essayist

“Have you ever given someone a book you enjoyed enormously, with a feeling of envy because they were about to read it for the first time, an experience you could never have again?”

Jack Finney book Time and Again

“Some people you will always have about you whom you can trust, and no man these days can boast of more than that. Remember them; forget the others.”

Hugh Lofting (1886–1947) British author, trained as a civil engineer

“That was one thing about books: once you read them they couldn’t be unread.”

Lev Grossman book The Magician's Land

“If one cannot enjoy reading a book over and over again, there is no use in reading it at all.”

Oscar Wilde (1854–1900) Irish writer and poet