All of the disparate books on my list contain characters, scenes or voices that linger long past the last page of their stories.

To read Helen Macdonald's memoir, H Is for Hawk, is to feel as though Emily Bronte just turned up at your door, trailing all the windy, feral outdoors into your living room.

The Unfortunate Importance of Beauty is a farcical fictional meditation on female beauty structured as a mash-up of an old episode of Friends, a fairy tale and a murder mystery.

It's not that I don't like people. It's just that when I'm in the company of others - even my nearest and dearest - there always comes a moment when I'd rather be reading a book.

Whatever (its) virtues, (the) writing explores the culture of work but marginalizes work itself.

Prolonged travel in the alternate world of books can also make a reader more prone to fantasy thinking and estranged from his or her “real” life.

Reality TV, blogging and self-publishing are all evidence of a society's or culture's desire to be more public. And that's a sign of a healthy or energetic culture.

According to a Wall Street Journal article some 59 percent of Americans don t own a single book. Not a cookbook or even the Bible.

In our daily lives, where we're bombarded by the fake and the trivial, reading serves as a way to stop, shut out the noise of the world, and try to grab hold of something real, no matter how small.

The danger in reviewing and teaching literature for a living (is) you can develop a kind of knee-jerk superiority to the material you're "decoding

I think the influence of books is neither direct and more predictable. Books themselves are too unruly, and so are readers.

I was like a chocolate in a box, looking well behaved and perfect in place, all the while harboring a secret center.

Bombay is a city where gossip is treated as a commodity.

I love weddings: happy people coming together to celebrate in great clothes.

People are always asking me in interviews, 'What do you think of foreign affairs?' I just say, 'I've had a few.'

The figure of my father looms large in my imagination.

Were there certain things that I didn't feel were dignified enough to make it into the movie? Yeah.

Never think you're better than anyone else, but don't let anyone treat you like you're worse than they are.

A little knowledge is a dangerous thing - it only hastens fools to rush in where angels fear to tread.

The new fad thing that's going through America and around the world. It's called global warming.

The words went round and round and round in my mind and my body, until I knew they were no longer my words but something that had been carved into my heart. And now my soul was crying.