Richard Powers Quotes

I read a lot growing up. It was kind of my comfort, you know; I loved it. I love story. I love narrative. I was academic. I wasn't particularly athletic. I didn't make the drill team. I didn't go out for sports.

When you read a book, you are letting another person distract your thoughts and work your emotions. If they are adept, there's nothing better than turning off and getting lost.

Books, I found, had the power to make time stand still, retreat or fly into the future.

Whenever I have a few hours to dive into a book, I am happy.

I get caught up in my bubble of reading, writing, or music.

Reading is something I've really missed, not being able to enter people's worlds.

I like to live in my own mind, regardless of everyone and everything, working out the intimate puzzles that are my stories and novels.

We read in bed because reading is halfway between life and dreaming, our own consciousness in someone else's mind.

You could say, in a vulgar Freudian way, that I am the unhappy child who escapes into books. Even as a child, I was most happy being alone. This has not changed.

My room for books and study or for sitting and thinking about nothing in particular to see what would happen was at the end of a hall.

I like to read away as much of the afternoon as possible, until real life rears its ugly head.

I love books and the latest autobiographies. I'm a Gemini and love being with people, but then again, I love my own company, which is when I read most.

I love comics. All I've been doing is reading every day, sitting in the house. Because I've not been feeling too good, so I've been reading and reading.

A well-composed book is a magic carpet on which we are wafted to a world that we cannot enter in any other way.

I was alone as a child. I lived in fairytales, adventures, Shakespeare. They are the friends, my books.

For me, books have always been a way to feel less alone while being alone. Perhaps if I was depressed and isolated, just communicating with these authors through their sentences helped me.

When I was growing up, the place I felt least alone was when I was reading.

I spent a lot of my childhood in my own head, making up stories. I didn't have a lot of outside influences, so I was able to make my own decisions about what I wanted to do.

I do, indeed, close my door at times and surrender myself to a book, but only because I can open the door again and see a human face looking at me.

I just enjoyed telling stories. I enjoyed watching films and reading and becoming someone else. I spent a lot of time on my own when I was younger; I enjoyed my own company and still do, so it was a source of escapism.

There are perhaps no days of our childhood we lived so fully as those we spent with a favorite book.

When people are reading a book, it's a personal thing. They're reading it; it's in their own mind; it's in their own personal space when they're reading it.

One of the things reading does, it makes your loneliness manageable if you are an essentially lonely person.

All writers are obviously neurotic... For various reasons, writers retreat into an imaginary world because they find ordinary life rather difficult or boring or both.

I'll read pretty much anywhere and anytime, but for a while now, I've really enjoyed reading on flights, especially the longer hauls, when I'm unplugged from everything and can completely immerse myself in the world of a book and submit happily to its rhythms, perspectives, ideas.