My students should be afraid: choosing what kind of work you'll do to a great extent means choosing who you'll be.

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.

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

War is hot, not cold.

Literature is not exhaustible, for the sufficient and simple reason that a single book is not.

Veins of ivy scale stones, find footholds butthe caretaker cuts earth short, peels creepers from Cotswold rock and props the deadhead to head so they won’ttopple like drunkson their moss-soft shadows.

The evening sky was awash with peach, apricot, cream: tender little ice-cream clouds in a wide orange sky.

Political tyranny is nothing compared to the social tyranny and a reformer who defies society is a more courageous man than a politician who defies Government.

No sustainable development, environmental harmony or lasting security will happen if we are unable to eradicate hunger and extreme inequality

Organic chemistry is the study of organs; inorganic chemistry is the study of the insides of organs.

We are losing our environment so rapidly.

As you go down the rabbit hole of reading into our history, you realize that there are so many things that history books didn't teach us about ourselves.