The love of books is among the choicest gifts of the gods.
My first love was reading, which inspired me to write.
The sincere love of books has nothing to do with cleverness or stupidity any more than any other sincere love. It is a quality of character, a freshness, a power of pleasure, a power of faith. A silly person may delight in reading masterpieces just as a silly person may delight in picking flowers. A fool may be in love with a poet as he may be in love with a woman.
Writing is a divine art, and the more I write and read the more I love it.
We live for books. A sweet mission in this world dominated by disorder and decay.
I had to learn, as I soon did, that one must give up everything and not do anything else but write, that one must writer and write and write, even if everybody in the world advises you against it, even if nobody believes in you.
What a blessing it is to love books as I love them;- to be able to converse with the dead, and to live amidst the unreal!
I am beguiled by your physical beauty, and I am moved by how head-over-heels in love with books you are. And nowhere else have I found such thoughtful and literate reportage on the state of the American soul, as that soul makes itself known in the books we write.
When I love a book, I really love a book. You don't get that very often.
I always read. You know how sharks have to keep swimming or they die? I’m like that. If I stop reading, I die.
When I was a ten-year old bookworm and used to kiss the dust jacket pictures of authors as if they were icons, it used to amaze me that these remote people could provoke me to love.
Normal people bring children into the world; we novelists bring books. We are condemned to put our whole lives into them, even though they hardly ever thank us for it. We are condemned to die in their pages and sometimes even to let our books be the ones who, in the end, will take our lives.
I have an intimate relationship with books. After all, I take them with me into the bathtub-not an invitation I offer lightly.
One of the best things Henry Miller ever said was that art goes all out. It's all out. It goes full length. . . . A big book is an all-out book in which you limit your life to things that pertain directly to the book.
As a child, I felt that books were holy objects, to be caressed, rapturously sniffed, and devotedly provided for. I gave my life to them. I still do. I continue to do what I did as a child; dream of books, make books and collect books.
Writing has to be an obsession - it's only for those who say, 'I'm not going to do anything else.'
'Twilight' passed like a fever through the sophisticated reader and the unsophisticated reader alike. People devoured those books in single sittings, over weekends, with a kind of raw intensity that is rare.
Dreiser... I love... and almost wouldn't speak to anyone who ever attacked him.
I would rather be dead than not read
Angela Carter's fiction blew me away and really instilled a passion for writing, bolstered by Vladimir Nabokov. But in general, I can't point to any one thing. I just always loved books and writing.
This (writing) is the love of your life. It's what I want to do when I wake up. Nothing feels so absorbing, so fulfilling.
If you truly love a book, you should sleep with it, write in it, read aloud from it, and fill its pages with muffin crumbs.
My religion is complicated. Literature is my true religion. After all, I come from a completely non-religious family.
For me, Anthony Powell is a religion. I read 'A Dance to the Music of Time' every few years.
The art and passion of reading well and deeply is waning, but [Jane] Austen still inspires people to become fanatical readers.
