#reading

"If you`re wondering how you`ll find time, it means you don`t really want to read. Because nobody`s ever got time. Children certainly haven`t, nor have teenagers or grown-ups. Life always gets in the way. <...>Time to read is always time stolen. <...>Stolen from what? From the tyranny of living.”- p.125"

"God comes down in the evenings to chat with man, enjoy man's company and find out how man faired in the course of the day."

"The walls of books around him, dense with the past, formed a kind of insulation against the present world and its disasters."

"You can never get a cup of tea large enough or a book long enough to suit me."

"We are so overwhelmed with quantities of books, that we hardly realize any more that a book can be valuable, valuable like a jewel, or a lovely picture, into which you can look deeper and deeper and get a more profound experience very time. It is far, far better to read one book six times, at intervals, than to read six several books."

"I have enjoyed most particularly reading the correspondence between Gustav Mahler and Richard Strauss. The genuine friendship, competitiveness and support that thread through their communications are life lessons for us all."

"When writers die they become books, which is, after all, not too bad an incarnation."[As attributed by Alastair Reid in Neruda and Borges, The New Yorker, June 24, 1996; as well as in The Talk of the Town, The New Yorker, July 7, 1986]"

"People can lose their lives in libraries. They ought to be warned."

"Donde no hay libros hace frío. Vale para las casas, las ciudades, los países. Un frío cataclismo, un páramo de amnesia"

"Books are love letters (or apologies) passed between us, adding a layer of conversation beyond our spoken words."

"Never did she find anything so difficult as to keep herself from losing her temper when she was suddenly disturbed while absorbed in a book."

"Reading furnishes the mind only with materials of knowledge; it is thinking that makes what we read ours."

"But the main reason you should read this is that I don't see why I should have to know all these terrible, terrible things and you should get off scot free."

"Literature is news that stays news."

"Reading is to the mind what exercise is to the body."

"Don't blow off another's candle for it won't make yours shine brighter."

"I'm pretty sure my addiction to reading has just reached a whole new level."

"Books are the ultimate Dumpees: put them down and they’ll wait for you forever; pay attention to them and they always love you back."

"People don't read any more. It's a sad state of affairs. Reading's the only thing that allows you to use your imagination. When you watch films it's someone else's vision, isn't it?"[Interview in The Independent, 15 October 2005]"

"I like best to have one book in my hand, and a stack of others on the floor beside me, so as to know the supply of poppy and mandragora will not run out before the small hours."