Quotes about Books and Reading

A truly great book should be read in youth, again in maturity and once more in old age, as a fine building should be seen by morning light, at noon and by moonlight.
Robertson Davies

Instead of going to Paris to attend lectures, go to the public library, and you won’t come out for twenty years, if you really wish to learn.
Leo Tolstoy

Reading, after a certain age, diverts the mind too much from its creative pursuits. Any man who reads too much and uses his own brain too little falls into lazy habits of thinking.
Albert Einstein

The pleasure of reading is doubled when one lives with another who shares the same books.
Stanislaw Jerzy Lec


How many a man has dated a new era in his life from the reading of a book.
Henry David Thoreau

A book is a version of the world. If you do not like it, ignore it; or offer your own version in return.
Salman Rushdie

A man's got to take a lot of punishment to write a really funny book.
Ernest Hemingway