“ The first sentence of every novel should be: Trust me, this will take time but there is order here, very faint, very human. Michael Ondaatje
“ That's what sofas are for: sit down, drink a cup of tea, talk of literature. At least that's how I see it. Sophie Divry
“ Reading is a time machine that allows you to acquire wisdom from the past and to analyze and imagine another person’s vision of the future. Joshua Rogers
“ We nurture the candle flames that show the way ahead. We are guerrillas of the word, unsung heroes breathing softly on the embers of the human mind, so that they might re-ignite the hearths around whi… Mark Cantrell
“ The slight, the facile and the merely self-glorifying tend to drop away over the centuries, and what we are left with is the bedrock: Homer and Milton, the Greek tragedian and Shakespeare, Chaucer and… Wendy Lesser
“ The writer is delegated to declare and to celebrate man's proven capacity for greatness of heart and spirit—for gallantry in defeat, for courage, compassion and love. In the endless war against weakne… John Steinbeck
“ He had some taste for romance reading before he went to the university, where, we must confess, in justice to his college, he was cured of the love of reading in all its shapes; and the cure would hav… Thomas Love Peacock
“ Reading literature is a way of reaching back to something bigger and older and different. It can give you the feeling that you belong to the past as well as the present, and it can help you realize th… Wendy Lesser
“ When a child is born, I once explained to the kids, some dads lay down bottles of wine for them that will mature when they grow up into ungrateful adults. Instead, what you're going to get from me, as… Mordecai Richler
“ This is the paradox of the power of literature: it seems that only when it is persecuted does it show its true powers, challenging authority, whereas in our permissive society it feels that it is bein… Italo Calvino
“ Hundreds of thousands of people live in my library. Some are real, others are fictional. The real ones are the so-called imaginary characters in works of literature, the fictional ones are their autho… Jacques Bonnet
“ To become a 'good reader' one must give oneself over to a regime of concentrated pleasure. One does not set out to read a book a day (there is no necessary pleasure in that) but may spend two or three… Michael Schmidt
“ The committees scour the bookstores, printing and publishing houses, paying particular attention to secondhand bookstores. There, they requisition countless copies of 'Incautious Maidens' or 'Flames a… Mariusz Szczygieł
“ Why would a book in which hardly anything happened for most of the time eat at me so much? It was the weirdest thing Cynthia Kadohata
“ Personally I know only one person who wrote about utopia. Afterwards he was executed. I suppose it's not my genre. Alexander Zalan
“ Books had taught me new ideas and had shown me ways of life that I would not have known about otherwise, and they offered a refuge when, like now, real life seemed too hard. Peg Kehret
“ Apart from such chaotic classics as these, my own taste in novel reading is one which I am prepared in a rather especial manner, not only to declare, but to defend. My taste is for the sensational nov… G.K. Chesterton
“ In classrooms and living rooms across the globe, an agnostic or an atheist may be heard to strenuously argue, 'But the Bible is just a book.' Similar arguments may be raised against other holy books.… Gerald Weaver
“ I think of literature - she wrote - as a vast country to the far borders of which I am journeying but cannot possibly reach. And I have started too late. I will never catch up. Alan Bennett
“ To leap over the wall of self, to look through another’s eyes--this is valuable experience, which literature offers. X. J. Kennedy
