Nelson Mandela Quotes

I've always thought that a good book should be either the entry point inward, to learn about yourself, or a door outward, to open you up to new worlds.

The library takes me away from my everyday life and allows me to see other places and learn to understand other people unlike myself.

Literature overtakes history, for literature gives you more than one life. It expands experience and opens new opportunities to readers.

In a real sense, people who have read good literature have lived more than people who cannot or will not read. It is not true that we have only one life to live; if we can read, we can live as many more lives and as many kinds of lives as we wish.

I don't live in books, but, boy, have books amplified my life.

You can travel through literature, and you can expand your mind through literature. It's so cheap to buy that kind of ticket.

The joy of reading can take you so many different places. In addition to intelligence and stretching your mind, I just think reading is so crucial in terms of being a well-rounded person.

Reading is another thing that has made me more human by exposing me to worlds I might never have entered and people I might never meet.

I think that's one of the most important things that books do: not to teach you anything, but to help you teach yourself by just being in the world of the book and having your own thoughts and reactions and noticing your own reactions and thoughts and learning about yourself that way.

Poetry helps me understand who I am. It helps me understand the world around me. But above all, what poetry has taught me is the fact that I need to embrace mystery in order to be completely human.

One of the fantastic things about books, fiction or non-fiction, is the way they give you a chance to look into different lives.

I like down-to-Earth characters, but I also like being able to get outside my box of knowledge.

I'd like to read a book sometime. I've never read a book before. That'd be an adventure. I understand they have pages and everything. Yeah, I've got to do that sometime.

I think reading is important for a variety of things. I mean, first of all, it's a way to get information and find out what's going on in the world. But also, it helps your imagination.

One of the main reasons I write fiction is to try to understand what life is like for people other than myself, to try to see the world through my characters' eyes. I often find that I'm able to understand certain emotional truths about my own life by exploring things from different vantages.

I realized all of the possibilities that could exist for me with my camera: all of the images that I could capture, all of the lives I could enter, all of the people I could meet and how much I could learn from them.

That is a good book which is opened with expectation, and closed with delight and profit.

A book is kind of like a river; I simply jump in and start swimming.

The greatest gift is a passion for reading. It is cheap, it consoles, it distracts, it excites, it gives you knowledge of the world and experience of a wide kind. It is a moral illumination.

If you read, the world is your oyster. It truly is. Reading makes everything possible.

Today I continue with my science-fiction reading habit and find it very mind-expanding. Always makes me think.

I grew up on particular movies that said something to me as a kid from Missouri, movies that showed me places I'd yet traveled, or different cultures, or explained something, or said something in a better way than I could ever say. I wanted to find the movies like that. It was less about a career than finding the films I wanted to see.

To read is to have experiences; every book changes my life at least a little bit. The first time I can remember this happening was when I was 10, with a biography of Thomas Edison.

Literature is such a profound and deep way to look into someone else's life, his mind, his hopes and thoughts. Books have opened so many doors for me, taking me to places where my normal life and its finite limits could never have.

What you look for as a reader is somebody who is going to take you and say, 'C'mon. Come into the story. I'm going to show you what there is to see.' The guide who is going to tell you, 'Pay attention over there,' or, 'Do you remember that other thing? Now watch!'