Literary Bonding Quotes

Keeping young people away from Shakespeare is like removing a link to their humanness.

One of the pleasantest things about book writing is that sometimes it brings one in touch with old friends.

I want to remind people of the great and profound joy that can be found in stories, and that stories can connect us to each other, and that reading together changes everybody involved.

It's an article of faith that the novels I've loved will live inside me forever.

To me, the solidarity of readers is far more important than the solidarity of writers, particularly since readers in fact find ways to connect over a book or books, whatever they may be.

Having the book-club army embrace you is a gift that keeps giving for years.

Part of the transaction between writer and reader is the pleasure of building a community and encouraging people to play along.

There is an extraordinary degree of amity among Washington poets. They hang together. You would be hard pressed to find that in Manhattan.

The first time I read an excellent work, it is to me just as if I gained a new friend; and when I read over a book I have perused before, it resembles the meeting of an old one.

My mother would read aloud to my father and me in the evening. She read mainly travel books.

Choose an author as you choose a friend.

The anti-apartheid prisoners on the island, like so many in every age and nation, found that Shakespeare had a peculiar ability to gentle their condition. They used to gather clandestinely to read the plays; on one occasion, the book was passed around for each man to mark his favourite lines.

Oh, what company good poets are!

The relationship with the words someone uses is more intimate and integrated than just a quick read and a blurb can ever be. This intimacy - the words on the page being sent back and forth from engaged editor to open author - is unique in my experience.

Teenage girls read in packs. It's true today, and it was true when I was a teen growing up in a small town in northeast Oklahoma.

Our house was awash in books, and my mother doled out her favorites like they were special treats - which they were.

While writing, writers are living inside a character or characters, and when the book ekes into the world, writers are living inside the reader. That's more than connecting.

A book is like a piece of rope; it takes on meaning only in connection with the things it holds together.

Books were in my family - books were my family.