"Today a reader, tomorrow a leader."
— Margaret Fuller

"Think before you speak. Read before you think."
— Fran Lebowitz (Metropolitan Life/Social Studies)

"If you truly love a book, you should sleep with it, write in it, read aloud from it, and fill its pages with muffin crumbs."
— Anne Fadiman

"We lusty bibliophiles know that reading, unlike just about anything else, is both good for you and loads of fun."
— Kevin Smokler (Bookmark Now: Writing in Unreaderly Times)

"The unread story is not a story; it is little black marks on wood pulp. The reader, reading it, makes it live: a live thing, a story."
— Ursula K. LeGuin (Dancing at the Edge of the World: Thoughts on Words, Women, Places)

"A wise reader reads the book of genius not with his heart, not so much with his brain, but with his spine. It is there that occurs the telltale tingle..."
— Vladimir Nabokov

"The good, the admirable reader identifies himself not with the boy or the girl in the book, but with the mind that conceived and composed that book."
— Vladmir Nabokov

"Our society accepts the book as a given, but the act of reading -- once considered useful and important, as well as potentially dangerous and subversive -- is now condescendingly accepted as a pastime, a slow pastime that lacks efficiency and does not contribute to the common good."
— Alberto Manguel (The Library at Night)

"Books themselves need no defense. Their spokesmen come and go, their readers live and die, they remain constant."
— Lawrence Clark Powell

"Every reader exists to ensure for a certain book a modest immortality. Reading is, in this sense, a ritual of rebirth."
— Alberto Manguel (The Library at Night)

"Readers, censors know, are defined by the books they read."
— Alberto Manguel (The Library at Night)

"We can imagine the books we'd like to read, even if they have not yet been written, and we can imagine libraries full of books we would like to possess, even if they are well beyond our reacher, because we enjoy dreaming up a library that reflects every one of our interests and every one of our foibles--a library that, in its variety and complexity, fully reflects the reader we are."
— Alberto Manguel (The Library at Night)

"Books. They are lined up on shelves or stacked on a table. There they are wrapped up in there jackets, lines of neat print on nicely bound pages. They look like such orderly, static things. Then you, the reader come along. You open the book jacket, and it can be like opening the gates to an unknown city, or opening the lid of a treasure chest. You read the first word and you're off on a journy of exploration and discovery."
— David Almond

"O Day of days when we can read! The reader and the book, either without the other is naught."
— Ralph Waldo Emerson

""When I get hold of a book I particularly admire, I am so enthusiastic that I loan it to someone who never brings it back.""
— Edgar Watson Howe

"But a reader's ambition knows no bounds."
— Alberto Manguel (The Library at Night)

"As readers, we have gone from learning a precious craft whose secret was held by a jealous few, to taking for granted a skin that has become subordinate to principles of mindless financial profit or mechanical efficiency, a skill for which governments care almost nothing."
— Alberto Manguel (The Library at Night)

"Better to work for yourself alone. You do as you like and follow your own ideas, you admire yourself and please yourself: isn’t that the main thing? And then the public is so stupid. Besides, who reads? And what do they read? And what do they admire?"
— Gustave Flaubert

""Imagine someone is racing intentionally towards his own destruction and you can save him - do you go ahead and save him? Imagine there's an operation, and the patient is a drug user and the drugs are incompatible with the anesthetic, but the patient is ashamed of being an addict and does not want to tell the anesthesiologist - do you talk to the anesthesiologist? Imagine a trial and a defendant who will be convicted if he doesn't admit to being left handed - do you tell the judge what's going on? Imagine he's gay, and could not have committed the crime because he's gay, but is ashamed of being gay. It isn't a question of whether the defendant should be ashamed of being left-handed or gay --- just imagine that he is""
— Bernhard Schlink

"It wasn't that I forgot Hanna. But at a certain point the memory of her stopped accompanying me wherever I went. She stayed behind, the way a city stays behind as a train pulls out of the station. It's there, somewhere behind you, and you could go back and make sure of it. But why should you?"
— Bernhard Schlink (The Reader)

"Every reader has found charms by which to secure possession of a page that, by magic, becomes as if never read before, fresh and immaculate."
— Alberto Manguel (The Library at Night)

"For when I trace back the years I have liv'd, gathering them up in my Memory, I see what a chequer'd Work Of Nature my life has been. If I were now to inscribe my own History with its unparalleled Sufferings and surprizing Adventures (as the Booksellers might indite it), I know that the great Part of the World would not believe the Passages there related, by reason of the Strangeness of them, but I cannot help their Unbelief; and if the Reader considers them to be but dark Conceits, then let him bethink himself that Humane life is quite out of the Light and that we are all Creatures of Darknesse."
— Peter Ackroyd (Hawksmoor)

"The Odyssey is the story of motion both purposeful and purposeless, successful and futile. What else is the history of law?"
— Bernhard Schlink (The Reader)

"I used to always read with a pen in my hand, as if the author and I were in a conversation. "
— Tara Bray Smith