Roald Dahl Quotes

To encounter a fine book and have time to read it is a wonderful thing.

You need have no dull hours if you are a sincere lover of books.

There's nothing wrong with reading a book you love over and over.

I figured I could read more than five pages tonight since I'd been deprived for the last couple of days. When I finished the fifteenth, I discovered I was three pages from the next chapter. Might as well end with a clean break. After I was done, I sighed and leaned back, feeling decadent and spent. Pure bliss. Books were a lot less messy than orgasms.

One should learn from a book. Books have a lot to teach us. They have a lot of empathy to impart to us, but they should also be fun. This stuff is fun! You shouldn't pick up a book and say, "Oh my god, I'm gonna better myself by reading this." You may better yourself by reading this, but who cares? Just have fun.

Nothing ever invented provides such sustenance, such infinite reward for time spent, as a good book.

If I were reading a book and happened to strike a wonderful passage I would close the book then and there and go for a walk. I hated the thought of coming to the end of a good book. I would tease it along, delay the inevitable as long as possible, But always, when I hit a great passage, I would stop reading immediately. Out I would go, rain, hail, snow or ice, and chew the cud.

Of all things I liked books best.

The true felicity of a lover of books is the luxurious turning of page by page, the surrender, not meanly abject, but deliberate and cautious, with your wits about you, as you deliver yourself into the keeping of the book. This I call reading.

Some of the sweetest hours in life, in retrospect will be found to have been spent with books.

Every time people force themselves to carry on with a book they're not enjoying, they reinforce the idea that reading is a duty.

Oh! I am delighted with the book! I should like to spend my whole life in reading it.

Whether it is fun to go to bed with a good book depends a great deal on who's reading it.

I can't imagine a man really enjoying a book and reading it only once.

My son and I discovered Terry Pratchett's books together, when he was about eleven years old. He'd be reading on his own and would start to laugh, and then eagerly read the passage aloud to me--and I'd do the same to him! Pratchett's books became a shared source of delight for us back then, and they still are today.

I declare after all there is no enjoyment like reading! How much sooner one tires of any thing than of a book! -- When I have a house of my own, I shall be miserable if I have not an excellent library.

Year followed struggling year for me, and all that time I read - I suppose few have ever read so. I began, as most young people do, by reading the books I enjoyed. But I found that narrowed my pleasure.

I even love the smell of books.

[D]on't ever apologize to an author for buying something in paperback, or taking it out from a library (that's what they're there for. Use your library). Don't apologize to this author for buying books second hand, or getting them from bookcrossing or borrowing a friend's copy. What's important to me is that people read the books and enjoy them, and that, at some point in there, the book was bought by someone. And that people who like things, tell other people. The most important thing is that people read.

If you don’t like to read, you haven’t found the right book.

I have an intimate relationship with books. After all, I take them with me into the bathtub-not an invitation I offer lightly.

I always thought the joy of reading a book is not knowing what happens next. (Leonard Shelby, Memento)

I look at [books] as a child looks at cakes - with glittering eyes and a watering mouth, imagining the pleasure that awaits him.

Salter is a writer who particularly rewards those for whom reading is an intense pleasure. He is among the very few North American writers all of whose work I want to read, whose as-yet-unpublished books I wait for impatiently.

Book lovers will understand me, and they will know too that part of the pleasure of a library lies in its very existence.