Harper Reed Quotes

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

My urge at Christmas time or Hanukkah-time or Kwanzaa-time is that people go to bookstores: that they walk around bookstores and look at the shelves. Go to look for authors that they've loved in the past and see what else those authors have written.

With all of their benefits, and there are many, one of the things I regret about e-books is that they have taken away the necessity of trawling foreign bookshops or the shelves of holiday houses to find something to read. I've come across gems and stinkers that way, and both can be fun.

As I've often said, you can shop online and find whatever you're looking for, but bookstores are where you find what you weren't looking for.

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

The terrible thing about the Internet and Amazon is that they take the magic and happy chaos out of book shopping. The Internet might give you what you want, but it won't give you what you need.

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 get transported when I read books.

The problem with digital books is that you can always find what you are looking for but you need to go to a bookstore to find what you weren't looking for.

I was lucky enough to be given books that weren't top sellers; books that were kind of under the radar.

What better way to expand your imagination than to read!

It is such a luxury to open a new book that's highly recommended by friends - either an inspirational yet humorously self-deprecating memoir, or a page-turning piece of fiction.

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

I remember vividly what it's like to read as a 10-year-old - that passionate inhabiting of a book.

My sense of what a book should be has changed so radically. I like to think for the better.

I travel a lot, so when I arrive in a city, I like to go to good local bookshops and make a selection based on how I'm feeling and what I'm thinking. The book I pick usually seems to have a definite karmic connection!

We are always looking for the book it is necessary to read next.

Those of us who know the transporting wonder of a reading life know that it little matters where we are when we talk about books or meet authors or bemoan the state of publishing because when we read, we are always inside, sheltered in that interior room, that clean, well-lighted, timeless place that is the written word.

As we go through this transition where a lot more people will be reading on devices, nobody is paying enough attention to make sure it's a smooth transition. I believe we still need places where people can go to handle, hold and talk about books, get information about what books are out there, and so on.

When I was twelve, Uncle Randall looked up long enough to see that I was a reader as well, so he walked me down his hall to a linen-closet door and opened it up onto a wall of paperbacks. There were books behind books, as deep in as I could reach. He told me to take three, and when I was done, bring them back and take three more.

A book is kind of like a river; I simply jump in and start swimming.

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.

Reading is such a personal thing to me. I'd much rather give someone a gift certificate to a bookstore, and let that person choose his or her own books.

I like to browse and just hang in bookstores.

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