On books and literature.Famous writers comment

• "A great book should leave you with many experiences, and slightly exhausted at the end. You live several lives while reading."
William Styron

"That is part of the beauty of literature. You discover that your longings are universal longings, that you're not lonely and isolated from anyone. You Belong"
 F. Scott Fitzgerald

• "In the highest civilization, the book is still the highest delight. He who has once known its satisfactions is provided with a resource against calamity."
Ralph Waldo Emerson

‘We die. That may be the meaning of life. But we do language. That may be the measure of our lives.’
Toni Morrison

• "There are worse crimes than burning books. One of them is not reading them."
Joseph Brodsky

• "To acquire the habit of reading is to construct for yourself a refuge from almost all the miseries of life."
W Somerset Maugham

• "Every man who knows how to read has it in his power to magnify himself, to multiply the ways in which he exists, to make his life full, significant, and interesting."
Aldous Huxley

"Books are the quietest and most constant of friends; they are the most accessible and wisest of counselors, and the most patient of teachers."
 Charles W. Eliot

• "Reading a book is like re-writing it for yourself. You bring to a novel, anything you read, all your experience of the world. You bring your history and you read it in your own terms."
Angela Carter

"Fiction reveals truth that reality obscures."
 Ralph Waldo Emerson

• "The dearest ones of time, the strongest friends of the soul – BOOKS."
Emily Dickinson

• "We don't need a list of rights and wrongs, tables of dos and don'ts: we need books, time, and silence. Thou shalt not is soon forgotten, but Once upon a time lasts forever."
Philip Pullman

• "Reading is the sole means by which we slip, involuntarily, often helplessly, into another's skin, another's voice, another's soul."
Joyce Carol Oates

"Lord! when you sell a man a book you don't sell just twelve ounces of paper and ink and glue - you sell him a whole new life. Love and friendship and humour and ships at sea by night - there's all heaven and earth in a book, a real book."
 Christopher Morley

• "I think we ought to read only the kind of books that wound or stab us. If the book we're reading doesn't wake us up with a blow to the head, what are we reading for? So that it will make us happy, as you write? Good Lord, we would be happy precisely if we had no books, and the kind of books that make us happy are the kind we could write ourselves if we had to. But we need books that affect us like a disaster, that grieve us deeply, like the death of someone we loved more than ourselves, like being banished into forests far from everyone, like a suicide. A book must be the axe for the frozen sea within us. That is my belief."
Franz Kafka

"There is something called the rapture of the deep, and it refers to what happens when a deep-sea diver spends too much time at the bottom of the ocean and can't tell which way is up. When he surfaces, he's liable to have a condition called the bends, where the body can't adapt to the oxygen levels in the atmosphere.
All of this happens to me when I surface from a great book."
- Nora Ephron