Quotes About Books

I grew up in a very British family who had been transplanted to Canada, and my grandmother's house was filled with English books. I was a very early reader, so I was really brought up being surrounded with piles of British books and British newspapers, British magazines. I developed a really great love of England.

I remember going to a monastery library when I was very young and being surrounded by ancient books. I fell in love.

I always wanted to grow up in a house full of books, English books, and I wanted the sort of fireplaces that worked, overstuffed chairs, that whole kind of fantasy of a bookish New England life. So the library gave me that; for the hours that I was there, I was surrounded by that atmosphere that I craved in my life.

Forget romantic fiction, a survey has found that most women would rather read a good book than go shopping, have sex, or sleep.

I am the first person to go to Barnes & Noble and buy the new self-help book. I like to fill out the surveys, then I get my friends' opinions on how I answered to see if I was being honest with myself or not.

The stakes in my books tend to be kind of ridiculously high. In 'Kid vs. Squid,' the question is whether or not the California coast will be subsumed by the ocean in favor of the creation of a new Atlantis. In 'The Boy at the End of the World,' what's at stake is the survival of the human species.

Look at a book. A book is the right size to be a book. They're solar-powered. If you drop them, they keep on being a book. You can find your place in microseconds. Books are really good at being books, and no matter what happens, books will survive.

I'm surviving and developing as a writer. I don't know what brings you to mass attention in terms of sales. But I've gotten more and more comfortable with it. Of course if that changes, I'll be comfortable with that. All I can do is write the best books I can.

I'm a huge fan of Alice Hoffman, Fred Chappell and Susan Elizabeth Phillips.

I'm mostly a historical romance reader, but I never miss a Susan Elizabeth Phillips book. Her characters are larger than life and heartbreakingly real at the same time. I don't know how she does it.

You sort of suspect if a book's fun to write, it will be fun to read.

I'm ridiculously proud of my children. More so than any of my books. I suspect I wouldn't have written any of them if I hadn't been lucky enough to have this huge family.

I'm a bit more of a suspense reader on the adult side, but my favorites were the ones I grew up reading.

Today we read books 'extensively,' often without sustained focus, and with rare exceptions we read each book only once. We value quantity of reading over quality of reading. We have no choice, if we want to keep up with the broader culture.

There are 195 crime books published in Sweden every year. You could cut that to 100 and keep the good ones.

Canada was for me very much Sweden, you know? Very much open people, that they read books, they go see films. I felt at home in Canada. And also, you speak French.

We wanted to describe society from our Left point of view. Per had written political books, but they'd only sold 300 copies. We realised that people read crime and through the stories we could show the reader that under the official image of welfare-state Sweden there was another layer of poverty, criminality and brutality.

I am a passionate nonfinisher. Life is too short, and there are too many great books to read, so if I lose interest or respect, I switch. But when, of course, when you really fall in love with a book, all the others are ignored.

I never read gossip press. I just read books. And I never switch on the TV anymore.

I remember that feeling when I was a young reader: finding books that were set in Sydney with Australian characters was incredibly exciting.

Here's my rule: You always want to pay cash for your own books, because if they look at the name on the credit card and then they look at the name on the book jacket, then there's this look of such profound sympathy for you that you had to resort to this. It really is withering.

I have an obsession with books about kids with Asperger's syndrome.

there are pleasures to be had from books beyond being lightly entertained. There is the pleasure of being challenged; the pleasure of feeling one's range and capacities expanding; the pleasure of entering into an unfamiliar world, and being led into empathy with a consciousness very different from one's own; the pleasure of knowing what others have already thought it worth knowing, and entering a larger conversation. ( The New Yorker , 13 Aug 2014)

Why have we books in heaven?" "Why not?" asked my brother. "What strange ideas we mortals have of the pleasures and duties of this blessed life!...