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.

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.

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.

Calm skies don't make skillful eagles.

A company has to be like that person who turns his cuffs up a different way, who smokes a certain brand of cigarette, who wears an obscure vintage watch.

Hope is believing in spite of the evidence, and then watching the evidence change.

You most likely know it as Myanmar, but it will always be Burma to me.

The world has become uglier since it began to look into a mirror every day; so let us settle for the mirror image and do without an inspection of the original.

As long as a woman can look ten years younger than her own daughter, she is perfectly satisfied.

Insulin resistance is the basis of all of the chronic diseases of aging, because the disease itself is actually aging.

You can't recall someone whose name has worn away.

Chavez will hit the canvas. He will be sitting in his corner, or with the doctor or referee stopping the fight. There's no other outcome.

One good deed dying tongueless Slaughters a thousand waiting upon that. Our praises are our wages.