Penelope Lively Quotes

I cannot live without books.

A love of books has opened so many doors for me. Stories have inspired me and taught me to aspire.

You can't write if you don't read.

Reading was and still is my real joy.

One of the greatest gifts my brother and I received from my mother was her love of literature and language. With their boundless energy, libraries open the door to these worlds and so many others. I urge young and old alike to embrace all that libraries have to offer.

When you sell a man a book, you don't sell him 12 ounces of paper and ink and glue - you sell him a whole new life.

I like to have books around to give me ideas-to get the verbal part of my brain to start working.

Reading is power. Reading is life.

Books are challenging and inspirational to me.

Books always help.

My passion for books has changed my life.

I think reading is one of the greatest forms of magic available to us on the planet. Reading is so important.

There is that romanticized idea of what a bookstore can be, what a library can be, what a shop can be. And to me, they are that. These are places that open doors into other worlds if only you're open to them.

Reading taught me how to write.

A library is the delivery room for the birth of ideas, a place where history comes to life.

My idea of a good time is creating something and reading a good book.

The Cemetery of Forgotten Books is a metaphor, not just for books but for ideas, for language, for knowledge, for beauty, for all the things that make us human, for collecting memory.

There is no substitute for books in the life of a child.

I swim in a sea of words. They flow around me and through me and, by a process that is not fully clear to me, some delicate hidden membrane draws forth the stuff that is the necessary condition of my life.

In my youth, I found that I was quite often inspired and pushed forward by what I read.

Books were my window on the world. Growing up at the Elephant and Castle, which was very rough, my paradise was the library.

A recluse without books and ink is already in life a dead man.

One of the great things about books is you can afford to do anything.

Reading is a huge part of life.

My early and invincible love of reading I would not exchange for all the riches of India.