Book Impact Quotes

The biggest book for me, when I was fifteen, was Crime and Punishment, which I read in a kind of fever. When I put it down, I thought, if this is what novels are then I want to be a novelist.

There are books that change the way you feel and see; this is one of them.

Reading a great book causes jolts and frights.

A book burrows into your life in a very profound way because the experience of reading is not passive.

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

When you read a great book, you don’t escape from life, you plunge deeper into it. There may be a superficial escape – into different countries, mores, speech patterns – but what you are essentially doing is furthering your understanding of life’s subtleties, paradoxes, joys, pains and truths. Reading and life are not separate but symbiotic.

'Moby-Dick' really threw me. I read it when I was 14 and my best friends were books. It changed the way I looked at the world.

When I was a child, when I was an adolescent, books saved me from despair: that convinced me that culture was the highest of values[...].

Aside from birthing me my first grey hairs and keeping me up at night more times than I'd like to count, 'The Subtle Art' taught me a lot about the nature of work. And a lot of that had to do with how my perception of the work itself evolved over the course of writing the book.

We do not so much want books for good people, as books which will make bad ones better.

I'll always be grateful for 'Are You There God? It's Me, Margaret.' It brought me many, many, readers.

I became a writer because I love books, and I believe in their power.

When you read a great book, you don't escape from life, you plunge deeper into it.

Right afterward I read Fast Food Nation. That book changed my life: It made me a vegetarian.

But I too hate long books: the better, the worse. If they're bad they merely make me pant with the effort of holding them up for a few minutes. But if they're good, I turn into a social moron for days, refusing to go out of my room, scowling and growling at interruptions, ignoring weddings and funerals, and making enemies out of friends. I still bear the scars of Middlemarch.

'Sag Harbor' was a very different book for me. It changed the way I thought about books that I wanted to do.

So you're the little woman who wrote the book that made this great war.

I have met thousands of children now, and not even one time has a child come up to me and said, 'Ms. Rowling, I'm so glad I've read these books because now I want to be a witch.'

The books that have helped me most are the ones I reacted to, not just read

Don DeLillo's 'White Noise,' which I read when I was 19. It showed me that a book can be funny as hell and deadly serious.

A second book that makes you rethink the first book is the Holy Grail of a series.

Sometimes, you read a book and it fills you with this weird evangelical zeal, and you become convinced that the shattered world will never be put back together unless and until all living humans read the book.

Hearing that people read my books when they were sick, or that the books helped them find an escape when they were having a hard time... stuff like that makes all the hard work pay off.

There is a wonderful book called "Gandhi's Truth," by Erik Erikson, the psychologist. It is a great book. And I remember reading that and thinking about this connection between what we think in our personal lives and how that manifests itself in our politics. Those are two books, just off the top, that I think are sort of representative of reading that I did at that time. I never get a chance to read anymore.

If we weigh the significance of a book by the effect it has on its readers, then the great children's books suddenly turn up very high on the list.