I like to get ten pages a day, which amounts to 2,000 words. That’s 180,000 words over a three-month span, a goodish length for a book — something in which the reader can get happily lost, if the tale is done well and stays fresh.
Six books… my mother didn’t want books falling into my hands. It never occurred to her that I fell into the books – that I put myself inside them for safe keeping.
I'm always amazed at friends who say they try to read at night in bed but always end up falling asleep. I have the opposite problem. If a book is good I can't go to sleep, and stay up way past my bedtime, hooked on the writing. Is anything better than waking up after a late-night read and diving right back into the plot before you even get out of bed to brush your teeth?
I fell into the books, and left myself there for safekeeping.
To me, it's a great day every time I receive a letter from somebody who climbed inside one of my books, inhabited it for a while, learned a little something, and emerged grateful.
Books are becoming everything to me. If I had at this moment any choice in life, I would bury myself in one of those immense libraries...and never pass a waking hour without a book before me.
Books swept me away, this way and that, one after the other; I made endless vows according to their lights for I believed them.
Some books you read. Some books you enjoy. But some books just swallow you up, heart and soul.
As a kid, during the school year, my head was often buried in a textbook or Judy Blume book; the words and pictures were the perfect, barrier-free environment for me.
I know what I should love to do - to build a study; to write, and to think of nothing else. I want to bury myself in a den of books. I want to saturate myself with the elements of which they are made, and breathe their atmosphere until I am of it. Not a bookworm, being which is to give off no utterances; but a man in the world of writing - one with a pen that shall stop men to listen to it, whether they wish to or not.
And when I was young, did I ever tell you, I always wanted to get inside a book and never come out again? I loved reading so much I wanted to be a part of it, and there were some books I could have stayed in for ever.
I entrench myself in my books equally against sorrow and the weather.
I love the process of cracking the spine for the first time and slowly sinking into a book. That will soon seem old-fashioned, I'm sure, like the time of illuminated manuscripts.
I have specific playlists for different books and characters. So, I need to have those with me. It helps me get into the mindset of the book.
No one has ever stepped twice into the same river. But did anyone ever step twice into the same book?
Immersing oneself in the problems of a book is a good way to keep from thinking of love.
Books read in a public library never have the same flavour as books read in the attic or the kitchen.
School was a source of great suffering to me, but once I learned to read, I disappeared into books, where I was a happy visitor to all the worlds that sprang full-blown from the printed page.
I'm always reading several books at the same time, depending on how deeply engrossed in it I am, if it's fiction and if it captures me.
Books are the key. A book cannot be accessed from afar. You have to hold it, you have to read it.
As if there's a world that exists that you're semi-privy to yet can't quite penetrate - that's how it feels when you're starting a book.
