Quotes about books

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“I'm about to commence four years of obeying the cause of a bruiser on a horse. I refuse to put down what might be the last book I see for months.”

Tamora Pierce (1954) American writer of fantasy novels for children

“Roses! I swear you men have all your romance from the same worn book. Flowers are a good thing, a sweet thing to give a lady. But it is always roses, always red, and always perfect hothouse blooms when they can come by them.”

Patrick Rothfuss book The Name of the Wind

“Being poor is only romantic in books.”

Sidney Sheldon book Rage of Angels

“Mikhail?… Try making suggestions next time, or just plain asking. You go do whatever it is you're doing, and I'll go search you extensive library for a book on manners.
-You will not find it.
-Why am I not surprised?”

Christine Feehan book Dark Prince

“The first duty of the novelist is to entertain. It is a moral duty. People who read your books are sick, sad, traveling, in the hospital waiting room while someone is dying. Books are written by the alone for the alone.”

Donna Tartt (1963) American writer

“That chain of relationships made me think of how connections are made--you read a book, you meet a person, you have a single experience, and your life is changed in some way. No act, therefore, however small, should be dismissed or ignored.”

Howard Zinn (1922–2010) author and historian

“Human lives are hard, even those of health and privilege, and don't make much sense. This is the message of the Book of Job: Any snappy explanation of suffering you come up with will be horseshit.”

Anne Lamott (1954) Novelist, essayist, memoirist, activist

“Shotgunning anybody in this room would be the moral equivalent of killing a car, a vacuum cleaner, a Barbie doll. Erasing a computer disk. Burning a Book. Probably that goes for killing anybody in the world. We're all such products.”

Chuck Palahniuk book Invisible Monsters

“Books wrote our life story, and as they accumulated on our shelves (and on our windowsills, and underneath our sofa, and on top of our refrigerator), they became chapters in it themselves.”

Anne Fadiman (1953) American essayist, journalist and magazine editor

“Never lend books, for no one ever returns them; the only books I have in my library are books that other folks have lent me.”

Anatole France (1844–1924) French writer

“Sometimes, I look outside, and I think that a lot of other people have seen this snow before. Just like I think that a lot of other people have read those books before. And listened to those songs.
I wonder how they feel tonight.”

Stephen Chbosky book The Perks of Being a Wallflower

“You cannot be afraid, Read the book. Smile at it. It's a great book-the greatest book you've ever read.”

Markus Zusak book The Book Thief

“Writing a long and substantial book is like having a friend and companion at your side, to whom you can always turn for comfort and amusement, and whose society becomes more attractive as a new and widening field of interest is lighted in the mind.”

Winston S. Churchill (1874–1965) Prime Minister of the United Kingdom

“I believe in books.”

Carole Maso (1956) American writer

“England has two books, the Bible and Shakespeare. England made Shakespeare, but the Bible made England.”

Victor Hugo (1802–1885) French poet, novelist, and dramatist

“Sentences must stir in a book like leaves in a forest, each distinct from each despite their resemblance.”

Gustave Flaubert (1821–1880) French writer (1821–1880)

“I heard a sigh, as though the books were breathing. I felt that this was where I belonged. This was where I lived.”

Alice Hoffman book The Ice Queen

“It wasn't until I started reading and found books they wouldn't let us read in school that I discovered you could be insane and happy and have a good life without being like everybody else.”

John Waters (1946) American filmmaker, actor, comedian and writer

“Books are, let's face it, better than everything else. If we played Cultural Fantasy Boxing League, and made books go fifteen rounds in the ring against the best that any other art form had to offer, then books would win pretty much every time.”

Nick Hornby book The Polysyllabic Spree

“Einstein was once asked how many feet are in a mile. Einstein's reply was "I don't know, why should I fill my brain with facts I can find in two minutes in any standard reference book?”

Albert Einstein (1879–1955) German-born physicist and founder of the theory of relativity

“Whenever you read a good book, somewhere in the world a door opens to allow in more light.”

Vera Nazarian (1966) American writer

“The one thing which seems to me quite impossible is to take into consideration the kind of book one is expected to write; surely one can only write the book that is there to be written.

(, 8 September 1935)”

Dorothy L. Sayers (1893–1957) English crime writer, playwright, essayist and Christian writer

“And I know I can do this because I went to London on my own, and because I solved the mystery…and I was brave and I wrote a book and that means I can do anything.”

Mark Haddon book The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time

“.. holding a book but reading the empty spaces.”

Ray Bradbury book Something Wicked This Way Comes

“It was one of the dullest speeches I ever heard. The Agee woman told us for three quarters of an hour how she came to write her beastly book, when a simple apology was all that was required.”

P.G. Wodehouse book The Girl in Blue

“Each book was a world unto itself, and in it I took refuge.”

Alberto Manguel (1948) writer

“Books and ideas are the most effective weapons against intolerance and ignorance.”

Lyndon B. Johnson (1908–1973) American politician, 36th president of the United States (in office from 1963 to 1969)

“I have no feelings of guilt regarding the books I have not read and perhaps will never read; I know that my books have unlimited patience. They will wait for me till the end of my days.”

Alberto Manguel (1948) writer

“There is nothing in your budget for joy. No books, no flowers, no music, not even a cold beer. And there is nothing in your budget to give away to someone else. We don’t help people who don’t have better values than you do.”

Robert Fulghum book All I Really Need to Know I Learned in Kindergarten

“Libraries really are wonderful. They're better than bookshops, even. I mean bookshops make a profit on selling you books, but libraries just sit there lending you books quietly out of the goodness of their hearts.”

Jo Walton book Among Others

“At one magical instant in your early childhood, the page of a book—that string of confused, alien ciphers—shivered into meaning. Words spoke to you, gave up their secrets; at that moment, whole universes opened. You became, irrevocably, a reader.”

Alberto Manguel (1948) writer

“Everybody knew that books were dangerous. Read the wrong book, it was said, and the words crawled around your brain on black legs and drove you mad, wicked mad.”

Frances Hardinge book Fly by Night

“I wished I could be alone in my room, with my books, away from these people.”

Khaled Hosseini book The Kite Runner

“Books - the best antidote against the marsh-gas of boredom and vacuity”

George Steiner (1929–2020) American writer

“There was the smell of old books, a smell that has a way of making all libraries seem the same. Some say that smell is asbestos.”

Scott Douglas (1963) American wheelchair tennis player

“His library was a fine dark place bricked with books, so anything could happen there and always did. All you had to do was pull a book from the shelf and open it and suddenly the darkness was not so dark anymore.”

Ray Bradbury Farewell Summer

“If you keep pretending you're in that book, it will make you not want to live in the life you're in.”

Cornelia Funke Inkheart trilogy

“I tried to make sense of the Four Books,
until love arrived,
and it all became a single syllable.”

Yunus Emre (1240–1321) Turkish sufi

“Keep good company, read good books, love good things and cultivate soul and body as faithfully as you can”

Louisa May Alcott book Rose in Bloom

“Kissing Simon was pleasant. It was a gentle sort of pleasant, like lying in a hammock on a summer day with a book and a glass of lemonade”

Cassandra Clare (1973) American author

“She read books as one would breathe air, to fill up and live. She read books as one would breathe ether, to sink in and die.”

Annie Dillard book The Living

“Handle a book as a bee does a flower, extract its sweetness but do not damage it.”

John Muir (1838–1914) Scottish-born American naturalist and author

“There is no future for e-books, because they are not books. E-books smell like burned fuel.”

Ray Bradbury (1920–2012) American writer

“While there may not be a book in every one of us, there is so often a damned good short story.”

Jeffrey Archer (1940) English author and former politician

“No one who writes a good book is really dead.”

Walter Moers (1957) German comic creator and author

“I can think of few better ways to introduce a child to books than to let her stack them, upend them, rearrange them, and get her fingerprints all over them.”

Anne Fadiman (1953) American essayist, journalist and magazine editor

“A person who publishes a book willfully appears before the populace with his pants down. If it is a good book nothing can hurt him. If it is a bad book nothing can help him.”

Edna St. Vincent Millay (1892–1950) American poet

“Great books write themselves, only bad books have to be written.”

F. Scott Fitzgerald (1896–1940) American novelist and screenwriter

“.. books look as if they contain knowledge, while e-readers look as if they contain information.”

Julian Barnes (1946) English writer

“The book to read is not the one that thinks for you but the one which makes you think.”

Harper Lee (1926–2016) American author

“If you only read the books that everyone else is reading, you can only think what everyone else is thinking.”

Haruki Murakami book Norwegian Wood

“Books are those faithful mirrors that reflect to our mind the minds of sages and heroes.”

Edward Gibbon (1737–1794) English historian and Member of Parliament

“This book is to be read in bed.”

Dr. Seuss (1904–1991) American children's writer and illustrator, co-founder of Beginner Books

“Reading one book is like eating one potato chip.”

Diane Duane book So You Want to Be a Wizard

“It is books that are a key to the wide world; if you can't do anything else, read all that you can.”

Jane Hamilton (1957) American novelist

“Success is a finished book, a stack of pages each of which is filled with words. If you reach that point, you have won a victory over yourself no less impressive than sailing single-handed around the world.”

Tom Clancy (1947–2013) American author

“I wish I could write a beautiful book to break those hearts that are soon to cease to exist: a book of faith and small neat worlds and of people who live by the philosophies of popular songs.”

Zelda Fitzgerald (1900–1948) Novelist, wife of F. Scott Fitzgerald

“Writers are not just people who sit down and write. They hazard themselves. Every time you compose a book your composition of yourself is at stake.”

E.L. Doctorow (1931–2015) novelist, editor, professor

“Most people who decide to grow personally find their first mentors in the pages of books.”

John C. Maxwell (1947) American author, speaker and pastor

“We may be in the Universe as dogs and cats are in our libraries, seeing the books and hearing the conversation, but having no inkling of the
meaning of it all.”

William James (1842–1910) American philosopher, psychologist, and pragmatist

“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 book Areopagitica

“Normally writers do not talk much, because they are saving their conversations for the readers of their book-
those invisible listeners with whom we wish to strike a sympathetic chord.”

Ruskin Bond (1934) British Indian writer

“Personally, I believe “Young Adult” to be an arbitrary title that means the book "Can be enjoyed by anyone/Has a main character who’s not quite an adult/Isn’t really boring.”

Shannon Hale (1974) American fantasy novelist

“Every one of my books had killed me a little more.”

Norman Mailer (1923–2007) American novelist, journalist, essayist, playwright, film maker, actor and political candidate

“When the Viennese government compiled a Catalogue of Forbidden Books in 1765, so many Austrians used it as a reading guide that the Hapsburg censors were forced to include the Catalogue itself as a forbidden book.”

Craig Nelson (1971) Scottish footballer

“When people read his books they have an uncontrollable desire to hang the author in the town square. I can’t think of a higher honor for a writer.”

Roberto Bolaño (1953–2003) Chilean author

“Librarians save lives: by handing the right book, at the right time, to a kid in need”

Judy Blume (1938) American children's writer

“Considering Adrian had once gotten bored while reading while reading a particularly long menu, I had a hard time imagining he'd read the Hugo book in any language.”

Richelle Mead book The Golden Lily

“So, what, you just decided to sack out here and seduce me when I walked in the door? Home from spending the night at my boyfriend's? After having sex with him that could go in the Guinness Book of Records?”

Charlaine Harris book Dead Reckoning

“Practically everybody in New York has half a mind to write a book -and does”

Groucho Marx (1890–1977) American comedian

“Anyone who is too lazy to master the comparatively small glossary necessary to understand Chaucer deserves to be shut out from the reading of good books forever.”

Ezra Pound book ABC of Reading

“Books make dangerous devils out of women.”

Yxta Maya Murray (1970) American writer

“Sighing, she shut the book with a snap. “All right. You need to vent, so I’ll listen to you vent. But do it quickly, because Rydstorm was about to plunder Sabine with his thick, hard—”

Gena Showalter (1975) American writer

“A lot of truths about the living world are recorded in bad books; they are just badly written about.”

Joseph Roth (1894–1939) austrian novelist and journalist

“Some women have a weakness for shoes… I can go barefoot if necessary. I have a weakness for books.”

Oprah Winfrey (1954) American businesswoman, talk show host, actress, producer, and philanthropist

“A book floated down the Amper River.
A boy jumped in, caught up to it, and held
it in his right hand. He grinned. He stood
waist-deep in the icy, Decemberish water.
“How about a kiss, Saumensch?” he said.”

Markus Zusak book The Book Thief

“Books may well be the only true magic.”

Alice Hoffman (1952) Novelist, young-adult writer, children's writer

“Remember, Maya: the things we respond to at twenty are not necessarily the same things we will respond to at forty and vice versa. This is true in books and also in life.”

Gabrielle Zevin (1977) American writer

“Might not hurt you to pick up a book, just as an experiment."

Whatever. I looked up the definition for 'nerd' in the dictionary. Know what it said?"

"I bet you'll tell me."

" 'If you're reading this, you are one.' "

You're a riot.”

Brandon Mull (1974) American fiction writer

“I don't remember ever feeling lonely; in fact, on the rare occasions when I met other children I found their games and their talk far less interesting than the adventures and dialogues I read in my books.”

Alberto Manguel (1948) writer

“If you read one book a week, starting at the age of 5, and live to be 80, you will have read a grand total of 3,900 books, a little over one-tenth of 1 percent of the books currently in print.”

Lewis Buzbee (1957) American writer

“Time is a river, and books are boats.”

Dan Brown (1964) American author

“What the hell? We’re all screwed up some way. At least you bathe and I don’t have to fight you for chicks. In my book, that makes you all right.”

Sherrilyn Kenyon (1965) Novelist

“The possession of a book becomes a substitute for reading it.”

Anthony Burgess (1917–1993) English writer

“An honest bookstore would post the following sign above its 'self-help' section: 'For true self-help, please visit our philosophy, literature, history and science sections, find yourself a good book, read it, and think about it.”

Roger Ebert (1942–2013) American film critic, author, journalist, and TV presenter

“I’d much rather pretend I’m
somewhere else, and any time I open
the pages of a book, that happens.”

Jodi Picoult (1966) Author

“There are books… which rank in our life with parents and lovers and passionate experiences.”

Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882) American philosopher, essayist, and poet

“Wasn't there a spell for making yourself happy? Somebody must have invented one. How could he have missed it? Why didn't they teach it? Was it in the library, a flying book fluttering just out of reach, beating its wings against some high window?”

Lev Grossman The Magicians

“I can't bear to be on a train without a book", she announced. " It's a form of self-defence in a way".”

John Boyne book The Absolutist

“Read. Forget everything you've been told about books and read.”

Paulo Coelho book Eleven Minutes

“There are only three forms of high art: the symphony, the illustrated children's book and the board game.”

Brian K. Vaughan (1976) American screenwriter, comic book creator

“I try to avoid having thoughts. They lead to other thoughts, and—if you're not careful—those lead to actions. Actions make you tired. I have this on rather good authority from someone who once read it in a book.”

Brandon Sanderson book Warbreaker

“The books that everybody admires are those that nobody reads.”

Anatole France (1844–1924) French writer

“I was impressed for the ten thousandth time by the fact that literature illuminates life only for those to whom books are a necessity. Books are unconvertible assets, to be passed on only to those who possess them already.”

Anthony Powell book The Valley of Bones

“Look, don't just stare at the pages," I used to tell my students. "Become the characters. Live inside the book.”

Wally Lamb (1950) american novelist

“Loneliness had taught Harriet that there was always someone who understood - it was just so often that they were dead, and in a book.”

Eva Ibbotson A Company of Swans

“I could not be happy with a man whose taste did not in every point coincide with my own. He must enter in all my feelings; the same books, the same music must charm us both.”

Jane Austen book Sense and Sensibility

“There were valuable first editions of books in the enormous library, most of them had been scribbled in by some idiot named Will H.”

Cassandra Clare book Lord of Shadows

“Unprovided with original learning, unformed in the habits of thinking, unskilled in the arts of composition, I resolved to write a book.”

Edward Gibbon (1737–1794) English historian and Member of Parliament