Books Reading Novels Quotes & Sayings

Reading old travel books or novels set in faraway places, spinning globes, unfolding maps, playing world music, eating in ethnic restaurants, meeting friends in cafes ... all these things are part of never-ending travel practice, not unlike doing scales on a piano, shooting free-throws, or meditating. — Phil Cousineau

I love research. Sometimes I think writing novels is just an excuse to allow myself this leisurely time of getting to know a period and reading its books and watching its films. I see it as a real treat. — Sarah Waters

Eventually, we come to love certain novels because we have expended so much imaginative labor on them. This is why we hang on to those novels, whose pages are creased and dog-eared. — Orhan Pamuk

Mary's reading list betrayed her passion for forensics and detective novels. There were so many scientific journals and books randomly strewn around her little one-room apartment that it looked like the Great White Hurracane had struck inside.

It's all part of my decorating scheme Mary would quip. This may look like the work of a slob, but if you look closer, you'll realize it's my way of giving color to an awfully drab floor. — Lawrence H. Levy

Sleep is highly overrated, Marmee; especially when there are books to be read. I shall sleep when I am dead and have enough of it. — H.L. Stephens

This consists in not taking a book into one's hand merely because it is interesting the great public at the time - such as political or religious pamphlets, novels, poetry, and the like, which make a noise and reach perhaps several editions in their first and last years of existence. Remember rather that the man who writes for fools always finds a large public: and only read for a limited and definite time exclusively the works of great minds, those who surpass other men of all times and countries, and whom the voice of fame points to as such. These alone really educate and instruct.

One can never read too little of bad, or too much of good books: bad books are intellectual poison; they destroy the mind — Arthur Schopenhauer

I grew up reading 19th-century novels and late Victorian children's books, so I try for a good story full of coincidence and error, landscape and weather. However, the world was radically changed during my lifetime, and I tell of that battering as best I can. — Fanny Howe

Comic books, graphic novels, involve constant toggling and it's hard work. You get tired reading comic books, but you never get tired looking at pictures or reading words. — Peter Schjeldahl

She had lolled about for three years at Girton with the kind of books she could equally have read at home
Jane Austen, Dickens, Conrad, all in the library downstairs, in complete sets. How had that pursuit, reading the novels that others took as their leisure, let her think she was superior to anyone else? — Ian McEwan

There are two novels that can change a bookish fourteen-year old's life: The Lord of the Rings and Atlas Shrugged. One is a childish fantasy that often engenders a lifelong obsession with its unbelievable heroes, leading to an emotionally stunted, socially crippled adulthood, unable to deal with the real world. The other, of course, involves orcs.
[Kung Fu Monkey
Ephemera, blog post, March 19, 2009] — John Rogers

Reading sparks writing. — A.D. Posey

I have a weird graphic I made for myself once, and it's the "lineage tree" of everyone that has inspired me and more importantly given me the permission to be myself in my work. There's a slew of people from theater: Erwin Piscator, Chekhov, Mac Wellman, Stein; and then a whole lot of wonderful works that are called novels: everything from Tristram Shandy to Bouvard and Pecuchet, to Virginia Woolf's Three Guineas, and Finnegan's Wake and Invisible Man, and then contemporary writers I'm currently reading like Renee Gladman and Anakana Schofield. There are many more in my graphic also: there's Beckett's novels and Melancholy of Resistance, and there's Reznikoff and Dos Passos, there are contemporary poets I admire like Jena Osman, dance-writers like Michelle Ellsworth, and books I can't help read for fun like Muriel Spark. But there's Groucho Marx and Oscar Wilde. It's a huge question and the answers would likely change daily. But these I'm talking about here are in the pantheon. — Thalia Field

Neither would you, had you grown up in a library of melodramatic romance novels. — Clementine Holzinger

Novels arise out of the shortcomings of history. — Novalis

"I always read everything when I was a kid-and I do mean everything, from Nancy Drew to Dickens to my dad's John D. MacDonald-but then I went to regular school and the English teachers started telling me to read 'real' books, so I tried. And you know, I kinda went off reading for a while. I had already been reading literary novels and the classics mixed in with whatever else, but-" She waved a hand. "So I went back to reading whatever I wanted, whenever I wanted to-reading had been my greatest pleasure in all the world. I mean I never really watched all that much television, because we were moving around, never really had solid digs until I was thirteen, so reading was everything. — Barbara O'Neal

Some people claim that it is okay to read trashy novels because sometimes you can find something valuable in them. You can also find a crust of bread in a garbage can, if you search long enough, but there is a better way. — Jim Rohn

The novels that get praised in the NY Review of Books aren't worth reading. Ninety-seven percent of science fiction is adolescent rubbish, but good science fiction is the best and only literature of our times. — Robert Anton Wilson

My guess? Romance novels. My guess? She started reading them early. My guess? She started them at a time where they made a huge impression on her and changed her perceptions. She isn't cocooned, she pays attention and she knows there are no men out there like the men in those books she reads so she prefers being with them than trying to find someone like them which, she thinks, is a fruitless endeavor. That fantasy is far better than any reality and, you know what? She's right. Men are a pain in the ass and a lot of them are dicks who cause heartbreak. And her, a girl like Faye? Well, she knows she's the kind of girl men like that will chew up and spit out. So she's smart and she's not going to go there. — Kristen Ashley

We want splendid books, books that immerse us in the splendor of reality and keep us there; books that prove to us that love is at work in the world next to evil, right up against it, at times indistinctly, and that it always will be, just the way that suffering will always ravage hearts. We want good novels ... And even if there is only one such book per decade, ... only one ... every ten years, that would be enough. We want nothing else. — Laurence Cosse

Whenever anyone declares having read a book of mine I am disappointed by the error. That's because my books are not to be read in the sense usually called reading: the only way it seems to me to approach the novels that I write is to catch them in the same manner that one catches an illness. — Antonio Lobo Antunes

As with any great literature, there are probably as many ways to read William Faulkner's writing as there are readers. There are hundreds of books devoted to interpretations of his novels, numerous biographies, and every year high school teachers and college professors guide their students through one or more of the novels. But after all is said and done, there are the books themselves, and the pleasure of reading them can be deep and lasting. The language Faulkner uses ranges from the poetically beautiful, nearly biblical to the coarse sounds of rough dialect. His characters linger in the mind, whether for their heroism or villainy, their stoicism or self-indulgence, their honesty or deceitfulness or self-deception, their wisdom or stupidity, their gentleness or cruelty. In short, like Shakespeare, William Faulkner understood what it means to be human. — William Faulkner

Meredith immersed herself in the novels. For some reason, fiction hit on the meaning of life so much more concisely than real life itself did. — Elin Hilderbrand

People don't read anymore. And, when they do, they don't read books like this one, but instead read books that depress them, because those books are seen as important. Somehow, the Librarians have successfully managed to convince most people in the Hushlands that they shouldn't read anything that isn't boring.
It comes down to Biblioden the Scrivener's great vision for the world - a vision in which people never do anything abnormal, never dream, and never experience anything strange. His minions teach people to stop reading fun books, and instead focus on fantasy novels. That's what I call them, because these books keep people trapped. Keep them inside the nice little fantasy that they consider to be the 'real' world. A fantasy that tells them they don't need to try something new.
After all, trying new things can be difficult. — Brandon Sanderson

I like Jo Nesbo and Hakan Nesser. There are so many good books in the world. I don't want to spend time reading bad crime novels. — Maj Sjowall

When a bookworm finally decides to leave the house, perhaps to explore some literary destination in one of her novels, she will be surprised to know that there is a volatile, often antagonistic force in the real world known as the weather. — Joyce Rachelle

Comic books are what novels used to be - an accessible, vernacular form with mass appeal - and if the highbrows are right, they're a form perfectly suited to our dumbed-down culture and collective attention deficit. — Charles McGrath

Besides it's not as though the prisoner can truly die, any more than a character in a novel can. You can always flip back to the first page, can't you? — Django Wexler

A good novel, one which entices the author as much as it beckons the reader. — W.J. Raymond

Don't try to resist the effect that a work of imaginative literature has on you. — Mortimer J. Adler

I already read everything. I read poems and plays and novels and newspapers and comic books and magazines. I read tins in supermarkets and leaflets that come through the door, unsolicited mail. None of it lasts long and it doesn't give me answers. Reading too fast is not soothing. — Janice Galloway

You'll want to read books - novels, because ladies are frivolous; poetry because ladies are sentimental; and sermons, because we are pious. If you must read essays, Mr. Emerson might be best. Your gentleman may have a nodding acquaintance with his works. — Donald McCaig

The man she wanted existed only in the romantic novels she was reading. She had met him. But he would never meet her. — Mary Papas

Reading opens up other pockets of the mind. — A.D. Posey

What a need we humans have for confession. To a priest, to a friend, to a psychoanalyst, to a relative, to an enemy, even to a torturer when there is no one else, it doesn't matter so long as we speak out what moves within us. Even the most secretive of us do it, if no more than writing in a private diary. And I have often thought as I read stories and novels and poems, especially poems, that they are no more than authors' confessions transformed by their art into something that confesses for us all. Indeed, looking back on my life-long passion for reading, the one activity that has kept me going and given me the most and only lasting pleasure, I think this is the reason that explains why it means so much to me. The books, the authors who matter the most are those who speak to me and speak for me all those things about life I most need to hear as the confession of myself. — Aidan Chambers

My only wish is to be buried with my books. — Nikita Dudani

I guess you can call me "old fashioned". I prefer the book with the pages that you can actually turn. Sure, I may have to lick the tip of my fingers so that the pages don't stick together when I'm enraptured in a story that I can't wait to get to the next page. But nothing beats the sound that an actual, physical book makes when you first crack it open or the smell of new, fresh printed words on the creamy white paper of a page turner. — Felicia Johnson

I have not read most of the big 19th - century novels that people consider "essential," nor most of the 20th-century ones for that matter. But this does not embarrass me. There are many films to see, many friends to visit, many walks to take, many playlists to assemble and many favorite books to reread. Life's too short for anxious score-keeping. Also, my grandmother is illiterate, and she's one of the best people I know. Reading is a deep personal consolation for me, but other things console, too. — Teju Cole

I grew up reading not-serious literature, like comic books and pulp novels, so my instinct is to amuse the reader and entertain. — Kevin Wilson

My platform has been to reach reluctant readers. And one of the best ways I found to motivate them is to connect them with reading that interests them, to expand the definition of reading to include humor, science fiction/fantasy, nonfiction, graphic novels, wordless books, audio books and comic books. — Jon Scieszka

I believe reading books is one of the best ways to gain real empathy for people different from ourselves, and helping boys develop empathy for girls is a cause worth fighting for. — Shannon Hale

I read daily, not so much for the benefit of my writing, but because I am addicted to it. There is nothing in the world for me that compares to being lost in a really good novel. That said, reading is an absolute must if you want to write. It is a trite enough thing to say, but very true nonetheless. I cannot understand aspiring writers who email me for advice and freely admit that they read very little. I have learned something from every writer I have ever read. Sometimes I have done so consciously, picking up something about how to frame a scene, or seeing a new possibility with regards to structure, or interesting ways to write dialogue. Other times, I think, my collective reading experience affects my sensibilities and informs me in ways that I am not quite aware of, but in real ways that impact how I approach writing. The short of it is, as an aspiring writer, there is nothing as damaging to your credibility as saying that you don't like to read — Khaled Hosseini

A man is like a two-story house. The first floor is equipped with an entrance and a living room. On the second floor is every family member's room. They enjoy listening to music and reading books. On the first underground floor is the ruin of people's memories. The room filled with darkness is the second underground floor. How deep is it? Nobody knows. Going down to the first underground floor, people can write novels and music. However, I believe that such works cannot move people's hearts. — Haruki Murakami

My only passions were books and music. As you might guess, I led a lonely life ... Not that I knew what I wanted in life - I didn't. I loved reading novels to distraction, but didn't write well enough to be a novelist; being an editor or a critic was out, too, since my tastes ran to the extremes. Novels should be for pure personal enjoyment, I decided, not part of your work or study. That's why I didn't study literature — Haruki Murakami

All my life I have been reading romance novels. Those stupid books ruined me. I've always wanted that fire that every book I ever read talks about. — Aurora Rose Reynolds

The best of fiction, as we know, of course, doesn't tell the truth; it tales the truth. — Criss Jami

The bookcase was filled with computer games, history books, and sci-fi novels in about equal proportions. Odd reading choices, maybe, but I just thought of it as past and future history. — Mike Mullin

A book is a place where my reality, escapism, hope, despair, love and death lie. — Nikita Dudani

People will tell you, "What's the use? What's the point of reading novels and poetry?" They'll tell you to go to law school or to be an economist or to do something useful. But books are useful. Books will make you thoughtful, and they might even make you happy. They will certainly help you to become more civilized. — Paul Theroux

Authors, she soon decided, were probably best met within the pages of their novels, and were as much creatures of the reader's imagination as the characters in their books. Nor did they seem to think one had done them a kindness by reading their writings. Rather they had done one the kindness by writing them. — Alan Bennett

Hey, laugh all you want, but I grew up poor in backwoods Florida, with an immigrant, single mom. I'm the only person in my family who learned to read, and that was only because of comic books at first, and then fantasy novels and an active imagination. I got addicted to them when I was a kid and read like crazy. I must have read thousands of them. So I've been reading about elves and that kind of thing for twenty plus years. I can't help it if I'm excited." "You were a geek," she said. "Well, I guess." "I bet you played Dungeons and Dragons in a friend's garage." "Well, yeah." "Nerd. — Larry Correia

The attraction of reading is that it allows you to live, for a few hours, as someone else - grants you access to their head, their thoughts, their secrets. — Alessandra Torre

He had a strange relationship with books. He had the notion that people who wrote novels were also lonely. He believed this more and more, reading between the lines of the novels he'd loved. Most books were about one kind of loneliness or another, about people who couldn't get what they wanted, people who found things hard, who were slow, or sad, or difficult. So he read most evenings, finding a comfort in following words written by someone like him. — Monique Roffey

The early readers are in-between books for the kids who aren't ready for novels yet but are done with my picture books. It's really rewarding to think that they can grow up reading my books at all the different levels. — Grace Lin

[T]he only luxury he allows himself is buying books, paperback books, mostly novels, American novels, British novels, foreign novels in translation, but in the end books are not luxuries so much as necessities, and reading is an addiction he has no wish to be cured of. — Paul Auster

When you get inside a literary novel you feel that the author, more often than not, just doesn't know enough about things. They haven't been around enough - novelists never go anywhere. Once I discovered true books about real things - books like 'How To Run a Company' - I stopped reading novels. — Peter York

It [fiction] allows us to see the world from the point of view of someone else and there has been quite a lot of neurological research that shows reading novels is actually good for you. It embeds you in society and makes you think about other people. People are certainly better at all sorts of things if they can hold a novel in their heads. It is quite a skill, but if you can't do it then you're missing out on something in life. I think you can tell, when you meet someone, whether they read novels or not. There is some little hollowness if they don't. — Philip Hensher

I could hardly wait for following chapters, which arrived in dribs and drabs, and I began to feel for all the world like the young T.B. Macaulay walking from London to meet the Cambridge coach bearing the next installment of Waverley novels. — Vernon Sproxton

Sometimes I wonder if novel writers aren't completely f**ked in the head. ~ Drew Stirling — Jayden Hunter

My attic study is full of books, around a thousand of them, of which I might have read a half, the others lie in wait; some were bought years ago and are destined to remain unread, others were consumed as soon as I brought them home. Some , more ancient acquisitions, glare back at me accusingly, claiming their right to be read, to be given the chance to relieve me of some particularly acute area of ignorance , of which I possess legion, there is never enough time to read all these books , there never will be time enough, there is never enough time in one life to read everything. — Richard Gwyn

Another time, talking about his books, the baroness confessed that she had never bothered to read any of them, because she hardly ever read 'difficult' or 'dark' novels like the ones he wrote. With the years, too, this habit had grown entrenched, and once she turned seventy the scope of her reading was restricted to fashion or news magazines. — Roberto Bolano

Historical novels are, without question, the best way of teaching history, for they offer the human stories behind the events and leave the reader with a desire to know more. — Louis L'Amour

When I meet children at book signings, they'll bring me photos of when I first met them many years ago when they were reading my picture books, and now they're telling me how much they enjoy my novels. — Grace Lin

Expand the definition of 'reading' to include non-fiction, humor, graphic novels, magazines, action adventure, and, yes, even websites. It's the pleasure of reading that counts; the focus will naturally broaden. A boy won't read shark books forever. — Jon Scieszka

I have to have three or four books going simultaneously. If I'm not impressed in the first 20 pages, I don't bother reading the rest, especially with novels. I'm not a book-club style reader. I'm not looking for life lessons or wanting people to think I'm smart because I'm reading a certain book. — Chris Abani

The only thing which can tell us about the novel is the novel. — Edwin Muir

Why did people ask "What is it about?" as if a novel had to be about only one thing. — Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie

After ten whole minutes of painful silence, I finally raised my hand and told Mr. O'Hara I loved Miranda Blythe's romance novels, and I decided I liked him immediately when he didn't laugh or reassure me that we'd be reading real books. Like Mrs. Andrews had last year.
He did say, 'I'm afraid Ms. Blythe is not on the curriculum this semester. We'll be starting your education with the epic poets - boring, I know, but necessary building blocks. However, an extra-credit book report is always welcome, and you're free to choose whatever topic you like.'
Then Mr. O'Hara added, 'I think Ms. Blythe's works would be a particularly interesting topic for a report. In fact, if you want an example of the archetypal hero journey - '
'Wait, wait, wait.' Fred raised his hand. 'You read romance novels?'
'My dear boy,' Mr. O'Hara replied, 'I read everything. — Caitlen Rubino-Bradway

I've been very influenced by folklore, fairy tales, and folk ballads, so I love all the classic works based on these things
like George Macdonald's 19th century fairy stories, the fairy poetry of W.B. Yeats, and Sylvia Townsend Warner's splendid book The Kingdoms of Elfin. (I think that particular book of hers wasn't published until the 1970s, not long before her death, but she was an English writer popular in the middle decades of the 20th century.)
I'm also a big Pre-Raphaelite fan, so I love William Morris' early fantasy novels.
Oh, and "Lud-in-the-Mist" by Hope Mirrlees (Neil Gaiman is a big fan of that one too), and I could go on and on but I won't! — Terri Windling

Miss Lasqueti consumed mostly crime thrillers, which constantly seemed to disappoint her. I suspect that for her the world was more accidental than any book's plot. Twice I saw her so irritated by a mystery that she half rose from the shadow of her chair and flung the paperback over the railing into the sea. — Michael Ondaatje

I'm talking about those novels where the characters aren't really interesting and you don't care about them or anything they care about. It's those books I won't read anymore. There's too much else to read
books about people and things that matter, books about life and death. — Will Schwalbe

She read novels. One book after another, sometimes at the rate of one a day, for a solid year. An acceptable form of escape that didn't leave a hangover. — Wendy Wax

People wonder why the novel is the most popular form of literature; people wonder why it is read more than books of science or books of metaphysics. The reason is very simple; it is merely that the novel is more true than they are. — G.K. Chesterton

After all, the world is not a stage-not to me: nor a theatre: nor a show-house of any sort. And art, especially novels, are not little theatres where the reader sits aloft and watches ... and sighs, commiserates, condones and smiles. That's what you want a book to be: because it leaves you so safe and superior, with your two-dollar ticket to the show. And that's what my books are not and never will be ... Whoever reads me will be in the thick of the scrimmage, and if he doesn't like it if he wants a safe seat in the audience-let him read someone else. — D.H. Lawrence

Like the roller coaster of life ... novels aren't fun without ups and downs and even an occasional loop. — Carmen DeSousa

There were adventure stories supplied with cloths for mopping your brow, thrillers containing pressed leaves of soothing valerian to be sniffed when the suspense became too great, and books with stout locks sealed by the Atlantean censorship authorities ("Sale permitted, reading prohibited!"). One shop sold nothing but 'half' works that broke off in the middle because their author had died while writing them; another specialised in novels whose protagonists were insects. I also saw a Wolperting shop that sold nothing but books on chess and another patronised exclusively by dwarfs with blond beards, all of whom wore eye-shades. — Walter Moers

Her mother likes to say that novels have ruined Amelia for real men. This observation insults Amelia because it implies that she only reads books with classically romantic heroes. She does not mind the occasional novel with a romantic hero but her reading taste are far more varied than that. Furthermore, she adores Humbert Humbert as a character while accepting the fact that she wouldn't really want him for a life partner, a boyfriend, or even a casual acquaintance. She feels the same way about Holden Caulfield, and Misters Rochester and Darcy. — Gabrielle Zevin

The difference between a person who appreciates books, even loves them, and a collector is not only degrees of affection, I realized. For the former, the bookshelf is a kind of memoir; there are my childhood books, my college books, my favorite novels, my inexplicable choices. Many matchmaking and social networking websites offer a place for members to list what they're reading for just this reason: books can reveal a lot about a person. This is particularly true of the collector, for whom the bookshelf is a reflection not just of what he has read but profoundly of who he is: 'Ownership is the most intimate relationship that one can have to objects. Not that they can come alive in him; it is he who comes alive in them,' wrote cultural critic Walter Benjamin. — Allison Hoover Bartlett

Eliot was scornful of idle women readers who imagined themselves the heroines of French novels, and of self-regarding folk who saw themselves in the most admirable character in a novel, and she hoped for more nuanced engagement from her own readers. Even so, all readers make books over in their own image, and according to their own experience. — Rebecca Mead

Radio is the medium that most closely approximates the experience of reading. As a novelist, I find it very exciting to be able to reach people who might not ever pick up one of my books, either because they can't afford it (as is often the case in Latin America), or because they just don't have the habit of reading novels. — Daniel Alarcon

We become attached to certain characters in novels, mostly because they have some mystery attaching to them. We re-read the books, but we're still left wanting to know more. In my own case, it was 'Great Expectations' and Miss Havisham in particular. Luckily, writers have the option of making up the knowledge that reading doesn't supply. — Ronald Frame

I received her sewing kit and pins and brooches; a blank diary purchased especially for me; "Advice to a Young Married Woman", by a minister, which she asked me not to read till I was older----; "Exemplary Letters for Sundry Occasions"; "The Whole Duty of Woman"; and some volumes of Walter Scott's novels, which I might enjoy when my reading had improved. With a glance at Rev. Fowler, whose advice she had sought in this matter, she said that, for a sensible girl such as she knew me to be, novels by respectable authors could provide harmless amusement, but I must remember not to neglect my duties for them, not to demand that my life be a romance, or over strain myself with too much reading. — Phillip Margulies

All good books are different but all bad books are exactly the same. I know this to be a fact because in my line of work I read a lot of bad books - books so bad they aren't even published, which is quite a feat, when you consider what is published.
And what they all have in common, these bad books, be they novels or memoirs, is this: they don't ring true. I'm not saying that a good book is true necessarily, just that it feels true for the time you're reading it. — Robert Harris

At Oxford University, I studied languages so I could read the great novels as they were originally written. I took what in the United States would be a double major in Russian and French, but I have to admit that the pressure of getting through so many books spoiled reading for me. — Kate Beckinsale

People listening to songs are like people reading novels: for a few minutes, for a few hours, someone else gets to come in and hijack that part of your brain that's always thinking. A good book or song kidnaps your interior voice and does all the driving. With the artist in charge you're free for a little while to leave your body and be someone else. — Douglas Coupland

Still, it strikes me that, taken together, they do make an argument, and it is this: the rise of American democracy is bound up with the history of reading and writing, which is one of the reasons the study of American history is inseparable from the study of American literature. In the early United States, literacy rates rose and the price of books and magazines and newspapers fell during the same decades that suffrage was being extended. With everything from constitutions and ballots to almanacs and novels, American wrote and read their way into a political culture inked and stamped and pressed in print. — Jill Lepore

I can imagine no greater bliss than to lie about, reading novels all day. — Julia Quinn

I often find that a novel, even a well-written and compelling novel, can become a blur to me soon after I've finished reading it. I recollect perfectly the feeling of reading it, the mood I occupied, but I am less sure about the narrative details. It is almost as if the book were, as Wittgenstein said of his propositions, a ladder to be climbed and then discarded after it has served its purpose. — Sven Birkerts

When I read a novel my imagination starts off at a gallop and leaves the narrator hidden in a cloud of dust; I have to come jogging twenty miles back to the denouement. — Henry James

When I want to read a novel, I write one. — Benjamin Disraeli

The secret of keeping young is to read children's books. You read the books they write for little children and you'll keep young. You read novels, philosophy, stuff like that and it makes you feel old. — John Cheever

Some children were lucky enough to have their Potter novels banned by witch-hunting school boards and micromanaging ministers. Is there any greater job than a book you're not allowed to read, a book you could go to hell for reading? — Ann Patchett

Even so-called 'short novels' are pretty long and can take several hours to read, so make sure you stay hydrated. I like to keep an isotonic sports drink handy if I'm going to be reading for any longer than forty minutes. I'll also take regular breaks and make sure I'm wearing loose-fitting clothing. — Richard Ayoade

I love reading all kinds of books. I usually have about ten books going at any one time - books about the past, the present, novels, non-fiction, poetry, mythology, religion, etc. Reading is my favorite thing to do. — Mary Pope Osborne

Reading a novel after reading semiotic theory was like jogging empty-handed after jogging with hand weights. What exquisite guilt she felt, wickedly enjoying narrative! Madeleine felt safe with a nineteenth century novel. There were going to be people in it. Something was going to happen to them in a place resembling the world. Then too there were lots of weddings in Wharton and Austen. There were all kinds of irresistible gloomy men. — Jeffrey Eugenides

My ears become my conduit to the world. In the darkness I listen - to thrillers, to detective novels, to romances; to family sagas, potboilers and historical novels; to ghost stories and classic fiction and chick lit; to bonkbusters and history books. I listen to good books and bad books, great books and terrible books; I do not discriminate. Steadily, hour after hour, in the darkness I consume them all. — Anna Lyndsey

I write short stories. They may appear big in size, but when you consider it, they're four or five novels in one ... In return for picking up one of my books, I'm trying to give them value for their money ... the goal of writing any book is to create the illusion that what you are reading is reality and you're part of it. — James Clavell