"The person, be it gentleman or lady, who has not pleasure in a good novel, must be intolerably stupid."
— Jane Austen (Northanger Abbey)

"I declare after all there is no enjoyment like reading! How much sooner one tires of any thing than of a book! -- When I have a house of my own, I shall be miserable if I have not an excellent library."
— Jane Austen (Pride and Prejudice)

"So many books, so little time."
— Frank Zappa

"book collecting is an obsession, an occupation, a disease, an addiction, a fascination, an absurdity, a fate. it is not a hobby. those who do it must do it. those who do not do it, think of it as a cousin of stamp collecting, a sister of the trophy cabinet, bastard of a sound bank account and a weak mind."
— Jeanette Winterson

"What refuge is there for the victim who is possessed with the feeling that there are a thousand new books he ought to read, while life is only long enough for him to read a hundred?"
— Oliver Wendell Holmes Sr.

"Books - the best antidote against the marsh-gas of boredom and vacuity"
— George Steiner

"I have always imagined that Paradise will be some kind of library."
— Jorge Luis Borges

"If one cannot enjoy reading a book over and over again, there is no use in reading it at all."
— Oscar Wilde

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

"Where is human nature so weak as in the bookstore?"
— Henry Ward Beecher

"If you have a garden and a library, you have everything you need."
— Marcus Tullius Cicero

"A literary academic can no more pass a bookstore than an alcoholic can pass a bar."
— Carolyn G. Heilbrun

"There is no mistaking a real book when one meets it. It is like falling in love, and like that colossal adventure it is an experience of great social import. Even as the tranced swain, the booklover yearns to tell others of his bliss. He writes letters about it, adds it to the postscript of all manner of communications, intrudes it into telephone messages, and insists on his friends writing down the title of the find. Like the simple-hearted betrothed, once certain of his conquest, "I want you to love her, too!""
— Christopher Morley

"You get a little moody sometimes but I think that's because you like to read. People that like to read are always a little fucked up."
— Pat Conroy (The Prince of Tides)

"Let children read whatever they want and then talk about it with them. If parents and kids can talk together, we won't have as much censorship because we won't have as much fear."
— Judy Blume

"In the shop window you have promptly identified the cover with the title you were looking for. Following this visual trail, you have forced your way through the shop past the thick barricade of Books You Haven't Read, which are frowning at you from the tables and shelves, trying to cow you...And thus you pass the outer girdle of ramparts, but then you are attacked by the infantry of Books That If You Had More Than One Life You Would Certainly Also Read But Unfortunately Your Days Are Numbered. With a rapid maneuver you bypass them and move into the phalanxes of the Books You Mean To Read But There Are Others You Must Read First, the Books Too Expensive Now And You'll Wait Till They're Remaindered, the Books ditto When They Come Out in Paperback, Books You Can Borrow From Somebody, Books That Everybody's Read So It's As If You Had Read Them, Too. "
— Italo Calvino (If On a Winter's Night a Traveler)

"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. Books make sense of life. The only problem is that the lives they make sense of are other people's lives, never your own."
— Julian Barnes (Flaubert's Parrot)

"Only bad books have good endings.
If a book is any good, it's ending is always bad - because you don't want the book to end."
— Pseudonymous Bosch (The Name of this Book is Secret)

"Of course I loved books more than people."
— Diane Setterfield (The Thirteenth Tale)

"Science and religion are not at odds. Science is simply too young to understand."
— Dan Brown (Angels & Demons)

"There weren't any curtains in the windows, and the books that didn't fit into the bookshelf lay piled on the floor like a bunch of intellectual refugees."
— Haruki Murakami (Sputnik Sweetheart)

"This is the most important thing about me--I'm a card-carrying reader. All I really want to do is sit and read or lie down and read or eat and read or shit and read. I'm a trained reader. I want a job where I get paid for reading books. And I don't have to make reports on what I read or to apply what I read."
— Maxine Hong Kingston (Tripmaster Monkey: His Fake Book)

"My Best Friend is a person who will give me a book I have not read."
— Abraham Lincoln

"It's not that I don't like people. It's just that when I'm in the company of others - even my nearest and dearest - there always comes a moment when I'd rather be reading a book."
— Maureen Corrigan (Leave Me Alone, I'm Reading: Finding and Losing Myself in Books)

"There are many little ways to enlarge your child's world. Love of books is the best of all."
— Jacqueline Bouvier Kennedy Onassis

"Never put off until tomorrow what you can do the day after tomorrow."
— Mark Twain

"I always arrive late at the office, but I make up for it by leaving early."
— Charles Lamb