Erik Larson Quotes

I like to give people novels I think they would like, on no particular occasion - just when we're in a bookstore together. I like to receive reference books on my birthday.

I don't want everyone to read anything; I like us all reading different books.

I read reviews and consider myself pretty 'plugged in' to the literary cosmos, yet one of the things I love best about book-touring is the opportunity to compare notes with favorite booksellers around the country. I always come home with books by authors I'd never heard of - or books I've read about but didn't realize I might love.

I try not to recommend too many books, frankly, because I think there's a certain synchronicity that happens when people discover books.

I myself love getting cookbooks and novels that some congenial person has already tried and liked.

What better way to expand your imagination than to read!

Going to the library was the one place we got to go without asking for permission. And they let us choose what we wanted to read. It was a feeling of having a book be mine entirely.

I thought I'd go to a bookstore and see what moved me.

Like many readers, I am continually in search of books that allow me to lose myself in an entirely unique universe.

After school, I'd hang out at the Borders bookstore until it closed.

People forget that writers start off being readers. We all love it when we find a terrific read, and we want to let people know about it.

Sometimes when I pick up a book off the shelf, when I'm buying a new book to read, I'll look at all of them and they all have the exact same words inside, but I'll think that one is meant to go home with me. I'll never pick the first thing off the shelf, I'll always go one behind.

We should all miss bookstores. They let you discover things.

If I am on a journey where I only have time to read one-and-a-half books, I never know which one-and-a-half I'll feel like reading. So I bring eight.

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!

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...

I get transported when I read books.

A reader's tastes are peculiar. Choosing books to read is like making your way down a remote and winding path. Your stops on that path are always idiosyncratic. One book leads to another and another the way one thought leads to another and another. My type of reader is the sort who burrows through the stacks in the bookstore or the library (or the Web site — stacks are stacks), yielding to impulse and instinct.

Books make great gifts because they're something you love that you can share.

Books make great gifts because they have whole worlds inside of them.

I believe in the magic of books. I believe that during certain periods in our lives we are drawn to particular books--whether it's strolling down the aisles of a bookshop with no idea whatsoever of what it is that we want to read and suddenly finding the most perfect, most wonderfully suitable book staring us right in the face. Unblinking. Or a chance meeting with a stranger or friend who recommends a book we would never ordinarily reach for. Books have the ability to find their own way into our lives.

When you publish a book, you do so in part to end the silence. All censorship is silence. I would never, as an author, feel right requiring a young person whose family would object to the book to read it. Just as I would never force that person to read it, I would ask those folks to not force others not to read it. To me, that is just good manners.

A man's bookcase will tell you everything you'll ever need to know about him," my father had told me more than once. "A businessman has business books and a dream has novels and books of poetry. Most women like reading about love, and a true revolutionary will have books about the minutiae of overthrowing the oppressor. A person with no books is inconsequential in a modern setting, but a peasant that reads is a prince in waiting.

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