Quotes About Books

When you write for children and young adults, you have much more affect and influence on them than when you write for adults. The books that get us through our childhood stay with us for life.

Books showed me there were possibilities in life, that there were actually people like me living in a world I could not only aspire to but attain. Reading gave me hope. For me, it was the open door.

When I read a good book, I wish my life were three thousand years long.

I have spent a reasonable percentage of my life in libraries - I like the hush.

What I've always tried to find in my books are points at which the private lives of the characters, and also my own, intersect with the public life of the culture.

Think about the books that you were reading at a certain crisis in your life, what you were reading, and that's because you needed them to nourish your alma.

A book which is left on a shelf is a dead thing but it is also a chrysalis, an inanimate object packed with the potential to burst into new life.

Books are a triviality. Life alone is great.

You cannot live this life anymore without the ability to read.

Books are for those without real lives, he thought. And they are no real replacement.

I'm not funny. People assume that because my books are funny, I'll be funny in real life. It's the inevitable disappointment of meeting me.

When people say there is too much violence in my books, what they are saying is there is too much reality in life.

I'm just doing what I've done my whole life, which is talking to people about books and making them read. It's what I do in my friendships. "Here, you have to read this, you have to read this."

I woke up one morning and realized that what I wanted to say to everyone - children, young people, adults - was: Read for your life.

Once I learned to read, I could not imagine my life otherwise.

Ten guards and the warden couldn't have torn me out of those books. Months passed without even thinking about being imprisoned....I had never been so truly free in my life.

Experience of life (not of books) is the only capital usable in such a book as you have attempted; one can make no judicious use of this capital while it is new.

Modernism: the books are as hard to understand as life itself.

Unlike life, when books become meaningless, they are making a point.

I never set out to write books for children. I don't have a feeling that I'm gonna save children or my life is devoted.

Resucitan los muertos? Los libros dicen que no, la noche grita que sí

Are the dead restored? The books say no, the night shouts yes

Are the dead restored? The books say no, the night shouts yes. I am twenty, I have reached the age of reason

I went to the library and found again the books that had changed my life: Sherwood Anderson, Jack London, Knut Hamsun, Dostoevsky, D'Annunzio, Pirandello, Flaubert, de Maupassant. The welcome they gave me was much warmer than the cold curiosity of old friends I met in the town.