I can always tell when you're reading somewhere in the house,' my mother used to say. 'There's a special silence, a reading silence.

- Francis Spufford

If your memory was OK you could descend upon on a bookshop – a big enough one so that the staff wouldn’t hassle a browser – and steal the contents of…

- Francis Spufford

Goblins burrowed in the earth, elves sang songs in the trees: Those were the obvious wonders of reading, but behind them lay the fundamental marvel t…

- Francis Spufford

If you based your knowledge of the human species exclusively on adverts, you'd think that the normal condition of humanity was to be a good-looking s…

- Francis Spufford

Belief demands that you dispense with illusion after illusion, while contemporary common sense requires continual, fluffy pretending - pretending tha…

- Francis Spufford

Emotions can certainly be misleading: they can fool you into believing stuff that is definitely, demonstrably untrue.

- Francis Spufford

We are supposed to be on the side of goodness in the sense that we need it, not that we are it.

- Francis Spufford

What follows is more about books than it is about me, but nonetheless it is my inward autobiography, for the words we take into ourselves help to sha…

- Francis Spufford

You never came out the way you came in.

- Francis Spufford