Mario Vargas Llosa Quotes

Through reading, I escaped the bad parts of my life in the South Bronx. And, through books, I got to travel the world and the universe. It, to me, was a passport out of my childhood and it remains a way - through the power of words - to change the world.

When you're a little kid, you are small, your life is small - and you're terrifically aware of that. But when you read, you can ride Arabian horses across the desert, you can be a dogsledder.

Reading is a discount ticket to everywhere.

As a kid, books were my great escape and my salvation.

Books were my pass to personal freedom. I learned to read at age three, and soon discovered there was a whole world to conquer that went beyond our farm in Mississippi.

Books are the perfect Time Machine. By the simple act of opening a book you can, in an instant, be travelling up a jungle river without once being bitten by mosquitoes, or you can almost die of thirst in the desert while holding a cold drink in your hand, or dine in the finest restaurants and never have to worry about paying the bill, or ride the wild country of our western frontier and never worry about losing your scalp to a raiding party.

Reading is where the wild things are.

For me, reading was always the great escape without getting your fingers burnt.

If I had my own Neverland it would probably be the coolest place in the world. You could do anything you want there. There would be trees everywhere.

I've always liked stories. I'm always reading, ever since I was a kid. I've always been reading and wanting to be in some other world.

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

Growing up, I was sort of a tomboy. I was the one skating with the boys.

I grew up in a house with very few books.

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

If I was a book, I would like to be a library book, so I would be taken home by all different sorts of kids.

I came from a house full of books, so I took reading for granted. I was an outdoorsy little kid, too, so I got the best of both worlds by taking books up trees and reading there.

I spent my whole childhood looking for an escape.

Acting offers me an outlet. Here is the perfect opportunity to spend fleeting moments becoming an entirely different person; to experience a character entirely unlike myself, but to also make such a character a part of me. There is no routine here; there is no boredom.

When I was in school, I used to look out the window and see the big red double-deck buses driving by. It just looked so free.

Reading changed dreams into life and life into dreams.

Children live in a world filled with possibilities. Their thoughts roam without boundaries, like dreams – full of images, places and actions. Unlike adults, they can’t temper their imaginations with experience. So, when a child plays with a toy or reads a story, it becomes an adventure, a new reality to them.

I like to read, even though it was really tough, because I could go anywhere in the world in a book, and I could have so many adventures in a book.

Growing up in the hot Last Vegas desert, all I wanted was to be free. I would daydream about traveling the world, living in a place where it snowed, and I would picture all of the stories that I would go on to tell.

I may not know how to fly but I know how to read, and that's almost the same thing.

Books are meat and medicine and flame and flight and flower steel, stitch, cloud and clout, and drumbeats on the air.