Quotes about reading

If you want to be a writer, you must do two things above all others: read a lot and write a lot.

Distrust the book which reads too easily because such writing appeals more to the senses than to the intellect. Hard reading exercises the mind.

The novel is, above all, an intense experience of prolonged intimacy with another consciousness.

He had accepted that if you were a bookish person the events in your life took place in your head.

I was carried away, swept along by the mighty stream of words pouring from the hundreds of pages. To me it was the ultimate book: once you had read it, neither your own life nor the world you lived in would ever look the same.

We had been so unlucky. By the time we had finally learnt to read properly, there had been nothing left for us to read.

There is no such thing as a moral or an immoral book. Books are well written or badly written, that’s all.

Reading is an intelligent way of not having to think.

“How can the answer to today’s questions be in such an old book?”

“The answers to almost all of today’s questions can be found in old books,” Smyke retorted. “If you want to find out, look them up. If not, forget it.”

... Books have their idiosyncrasies as well as people, and will not show me their full beauties unless the place and time in which they are read suits them. If, for instance, I cannot read Thoreau in a drawing-room, how much less would I ever dream of reading Boswell in the grass by a pond! Imagine carrying him off in company with his great friend to a lonely dell in a rye-field, and expecting them to be entertaining. "Nay, my dear lady," the great man would say in mighty tones of rebuke, "this will never do. Lie in a rye-field? What folly is that? And who would converse in a damp hollow that can help it?" So I read and laugh over my Boswell in the library when the lamps are lit, buried in cushion and surrounded by every sign of civilisation, with the drawn curtains shutting out the garden and the country solitude so much disliked by both sage and disciple. Indeed, It is Bozzy who asserts that in the country the only things that make him happy are meals.

It is in imaginative literature — including those parts of it which pass for history and biography — that what may be good in human life is concretely represented.

Never did she find anything so difficult as to keep herself from losing her temper when she was suddenly disturbed while absorbed in a book. People who are fond of books know the feeling of irritation which sweeps over them at such a moment. The temptation to be unreasonable and snappish is one not easy to manage.