I lived in books more than I lived anywhere else.

The people in books become more real to you than any one in actual life.

It was books that taught me that the things that tormented me most were the very things that connected me with all the people who were alive, or who had ever been alive.

Books, words, were my most treasured escape. I lived inside stories, I breathed them. I felt like they made me more human, or a better human…

So books are real to me, too; they link me not just with other minds but with the vision of other minds, what those minds understand and see. I see their worlds as well as I see my own.

Like so many of the other books I read, it never seemed to me like a book, but like a place I had lived in, had visited and would visit again, just as all the people in them, every blessed one – Anne of Green Gables, Heidi, Jay Gatsby, Elizabeth Bennet, Scarlet O'Hara, Dill and Scout, Miss Marple, and Hercule Poirot – were more real than the real people I knew.

For books are more than books, they are the life
The very heart and core of ages past,
The reason why men lived and worked and died,
The essence and quintessence of their lives.

My love of books was all that saved me.

For books are more than books, they are the life, the very heart and core of ages past.

There is something very intimate and personal about one's books. They reveal so much of one's private soul.

His books were part of him. Each year of his life, it seemed, his books became more and more a part of him. This room, thirty by twenty feet, and the walls of shelves filled with books, had for him the murmuring of many voices. In the books of Herodotus, Tacitus, Rabelais, Thomas Browne, John Milton, and scores of others, he had found men of face and voice more real to him than many a man he had met for a smoke and a talk.

As the new work fills my notebooks, I've come to realize that the characters in my stories were so real because I really did want to get close to people, I really did want to know them. It was just easier to do it on paper, one step removed.

Books delight to the very marrow of one's bones. They speak to us, consult with us, and join with us in a living and intense intimacy.

I was burning through books every day - stories about people and places I'd never heard of. They were perhaps the only thing that kept me from teetering into utter despair.