Good friends, good books and a sleepy conscience: this is the ideal life.

Books are a hard-bound drug with no danger of an overdose. I am the happy victim of books.

We write to taste life twice, in the moment and in retrospect

You can’t buy happiness, but you can buy books and that’s kind of the same thing

Books fall open, you fall in

One can’t prescribe books, even the best books, to people unless one knows a good deal about each individual person.

Reading makes immigrants of us all. It takes us away from home, but, most important, it finds homes for us everywhere.

Always read something that will make you look good if you die in the middle of it.

If we encounter a man of rare intellect, we should ask him what books he reads.

If you only read the books that everyone else is reading, you can only think what everyone else is thinking.

There is a great deal of difference between an eager man who wants to read a book and the tired man who wants a book to read.

Make it a rule never to give a child a book you would not read yourself.

Where is human nature so weak as in the bookstore?

I have always imagined that Paradise will be a kind of library.

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

Never lend books - nobody ever returns them; the only books I have in my library are those which people have lent me.

If a book is worth reading, it is worth buying.

I am a part of all I have read.

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

Easy reading is damn hard writing.

From the moment I picked up your book until the moment I put it down, I was convulsed with laughter. Someday I intend reading it.

Thank you for sending me a copy of your book—I'll waste no time reading it.

Your manuscript is both good and original, but the part that is good is not original and the part that is original is not good.

A room without books is like a body without a soul.

The man who does not read good books has no advantage over the man who can't read them.

One's chances of survival increase with each book one reads.

Books say: She did this because. Life says: She did this. Books are where things are explained to you; life is where things aren’t. I’m not surprised some people prefer books.

Give me books, fruit, French wine and fine weather and a little music out of doors, played by somebody I do not know.

I don’t think anyone should write their autobiography until after they’re dead.