Anatole France Quotes

A childhood without books – that would be no childhood. That would be like being shut out from the enchanted place where you can go and find the rarest kind of joy.

...next to the pleasure of reading a favourite fishing book comes that of persuading a friend to read it too.

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

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

The greatest pleasure of reading consists in re-reading.

I think I write in order to discover on my shelf a new book that I would enjoy reading, or to see a new play that would engross me.

There is such seduction in a library of good books that I cannot resist the temptation to luxuriate in reading.

The greatest pleasure in life is that of reading while we are young. I have had as much of this pleasure perhaps as any one.

I began reading everyhing in the family library. Kidnapped, Treasure Island, Robinson Crusoe. And of course, if you're running out of books to read you can always read Shakespeare.

When I think of all the books still left for me to read, I am certain of further happiness.

I have always been a reader; I have read at every stage of my life, and there has never been a time when reading was not my greatest joy

He liked to read with the silence and the golden color of the whiskey as his companions. He liked food, people, talk, but reading was an inexhaustible pleasure. What the joys of music were to others, words on a page were to him.

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.

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

There is only one way to read, which is to browse in libraries and bookshops, picking up books that attract you, reading only those, dropping them when they bore you, skipping the parts that drag...

The pleasures of writing correspond exactly to the pleasures of reading

I love to read. I wish I could advise more people to read. There's a whole other world in books.

My friend, Dennis Mathis, was reading Eastern European and Japanese experimental writers, and I brought the Latin American writers to his attention, so we exchanged books and bounced off one another.

Books make great gifts because they have whole worlds inside of them. And it's much cheaper to buy somebody a book than it is to buy them the whole world!

I leapt eagerly into books. The characters’ lives were so much more interesting than the lonely heartbeat of my own.

How much sooner one tires of anything than of a book!

Books are to be called for and supplied on the assumption that the process of reading is not a half-sleep, but in the highest sense an exercise, a gymnastic struggle; that the reader is to do something for himself.

But it doesn't stop at school. We can all enjoy books throughout our lives - as I certainly continue to do.

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

I even love the smell of books.