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.

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.

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

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.

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.

When you find that no one is loving you, be kind and give them your love.

To be likeable as a woman, it seems, you have to ensure that you’re also non-threatening and slightly useless.

Anyone with an Internet service provider can be a pundit or whatever they want.

I grew up in Southern California so I was always at the beach and outdoors. I remember my dad laying around the pool baking; he was practically George Hamilton.

I am more feminist than feminists.

If it was necessary to tolerate in other people everything that one permits oneself, life would be unbearable.

The rate of inflation can't be judged accurately by a few items the government arbitrarily chooses to measure.

What I'd love more than anything is for Worldbuilders to continue to grow and become entangled in all the different corners of the geek community.

You know, bad people, I've never seen bad people have angels.

The true picture of the past flits by. The past can be seized only as an image which flashes up at the instant when it can be recognized and is never seen again.