Books are a hard-bound drug with no danger of an overdose. I am the happy victim of books.
I read constantly. If I don't have a good book, I'm beside myself.
I cannot live without books.
...If I don't have twenty or thirty books right here, waiting to be read, I start jonesing. That's my compulsion.
I suspect it may be like the difference between a drinker and an alcoholic; the one merely reads books, the other needs books to make it through the day.
I cannot imagine life without books any more than I can imagine life without breathing.
The book can produce an addiction as fierce as heroin or nicotine, forcing us to spend much of our lives, like junkies, in book shops and libraries, those literary counterparts to the opium den.
She read books quickly and compulsively, paperback after paperback, as if she might drift away without the anchor of the printed page.
I can't exist without books.
I can never get to sleep without a book.
Anyone who picks up a Compton-Burnett finds it very hard not to put it down.
The truth is, I can’t read anything with any distance. Every book is a self-help book to me. Just having them makes me feel better.
Some books are serials, not to be mistaken for anything else. 'The Two Towers,' for example, ought never to be read in isolation.
This must be what an addict feels like, I think, trying to fight the pull of one last, quick read. My fingers itch toward the binding, and finally, with a sigh of regret, I just grab the book and open it, hungrily reading the story.
