American books reflect our common heritage with many other nations and their influence upon our culture. The influences are endless, linking us with the rest of the world. Thus, they are good ambassadors for us.
Present-day Spain translates as many books into Spanish, annually, as the Arab world has translated into Arabic in the past 1,100 years.
It's fun for me to be with someone who loves reading as much as I do, because he'll give me things to read that I wouldn't normally seek out, and I think vice versa.
Booksellers are the bartenders of the reading world. People share thoughts and interests they keep private from others in their lives.
Asking anyone what she or he is reading is a necessary part of conversation, exchanging news. So I take recommendations from friends - and I always pass along a book I've loved.
I like to build places online where readers can have productive conversations about books.
A writer is, after all, only half his book. The other half is the reader and from the reader the writer learns.
France is very welcoming to foreign writers.
In Japan, the writers have made up a literary community, a circle, a society. I think 90 percent of Japan's writers live in Tokyo. Naturally, they make a community. There are groups and customs, and so they are tied up in a way.
I don't think contemporary writers spend a lot of time reading each other. Particularly writers of the same nationality.
Books are something social - a writer speaking to a reader - so I think making the reading of a book the center of a social event, the meeting of a book club, is a brilliant idea.
I get inspired by my friends, and if a friend is a writer, that is even deeper.
I am really interested in the way we relate to time. In particular, the way readers and writers talk to each other. Casting your voice out into the future is very beautiful to me.
My main wish is to get my books into other people's rooms, and to keep other people's books out of mine.
I'm a library user and I just don't hoard books. To me, they're for sharing.
Being published in Arabic is a strong and consistent wish I have. I live in the Middle East and want to be in some sort of an unpragmatic dialogue with my neighbors.
We learned in the university to consider Wordsworth and Keats as Romantics. They were only a generation apart, but Wordsworth didn't even read Keats's book when he gave him a copy.
I enjoy being influenced by other writers.
Always, always, always pass a good book along on to somebody else.
Japan, Germany, and India seem to me to have serious writers, readers, and book buyers, but the Netherlands has struck me as the most robust literary culture in the world.
The first author I met socially was Joyce Cary.
Why may not a Republic of Letters be realized in America as well as a Republican Government?
A book lying idle on a shelf is wasted ammunition. Like money, books must be kept in constant circulation. Lend and borrow to the maximum.
As a teenager I wrote to R.A. Lafferty. And he responded, too, with letters that were like R.A. Lafferty short stories, filled with elliptical answers to straight questions and simple answers to complicated ones.
My friend Akshay Upadhyay and I used to write poetry and read out to each other.
