"How do I know what I think until I see what I say?"
— E.M. Forster

"It is what you read when you don't have to that determines what you will be when you can't help it."
— Oscar Wilde

"She is too fond of books, and it has turned her brain."
— Louisa May Alcott (Work: A Story of Experience)

"It is a good rule after reading a new book, never to allow yourself another new one till you have read an old one in between."
— C.S. Lewis

"Finally, from so little sleeping and so much reading, his brain dried up and he went completely out of his mind."
— Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra (Don Quixote)

"The world was hers for the reading."
— Betty Smith (A Tree Grows in Brooklyn)

"After nourishment, shelter and companionship, stories are the thing we need most in the world."
— Philip Pullman

"I would feel more optimistic about a bright future for man if he spent less time proving that he can outwit Nature and more time tasting her sweetness and respecting her seniority."
— E.B. White (Letters of E. B. White)

"And it never failed that during the dry years the people forgot about the rich years, and during the wet years they lost all memory of the dry years. It was always that way."
— John Steinbeck

"To sit in the shade on a fine day, and look upon verdure is the most perfect refreshment."
— Jane Austen

"The more one judges, the less one loves."
— Honoré de Balzac

"Next to music beer was best."
— Carson McCullers (The Heart Is a Lonely Hunter)

"I have always been a reader; I have read at every stage of my life, and there has never been a time when reading was not my greatest joy. And yet I cannot pretend that the reading I have done in my adult years matches in its impact on my soul the reading I did as a child. I still believe in stories. I still forget myself when I am in the middle of a good book. Yet it is not the same. Books are, for me, it must be said, the most important thing; what I cannot forget is that there was a time when they were at once more banal and more essential than that. When I was a child, books were everything. And so there is in me, always, a nostalgic yearning for the lost pleasure of books. It is not a yearning that one ever expects to be fulfilled."
— Diane Setterfield (The Thirteenth Tale : A Novel)

"I know there are people who don't read fiction at all, and I find it hard to understand how they can bear to be inside the same head all the time."
— Diane Setterfield

"Try to understand men. If you understand each other you will be kind to each other. Knowing a man well never leads to hate and almost always leads to love."
— John Steinbeck

"I believe that there is one story in the world, and only one. . . . Humans are caught—in their lives, in their thoughts, in their hungers and ambitions, in their avarice and cruelty, and in their kindness and generosity too—in a net of good and evil. . . . There is no other story. A man, after he has brushed off the dust and chips of his life, will have left only the hard, clean questions: Was it good or was it evil? Have I done well—or ill?"
— John Steinbeck (East of Eden)