In the compact between novelist and reader, the novelist promises to lie, and the reader promises to allow it.
Above all, a book is a riverbank for the river of language. Language without the riverbank is only television talk – a free fall, a loose splash, a spill.
A classic is a book which with each rereading offers as much of a sense of discovery as the first reading.
It’s better not to know authors personally, because the real person never corresponds to the image you form of him from reading his books.
I’m reading! I don’t want to be disturbed!
The things that the novel does not say are necessarily more numerous than those it does say and only a special halo around what is written can give the illusion that you are reading also what is not written.
You are about to begin reading Italo Calvino’s new novel, If on a winter’s night a traveler.
Today each of you is the object of the other’s reading, one reads in the other the unwritten story.
Reading is going toward something that is about to be, and no one yet knows what it will be.
A classic is the term given to any book which comes to represent the whole universe, a book on a par with ancient talismans.
Reading, like writing, is a creative act. If readers only bring a narrow range of themselves to the book, then they’ll only see their narrow range reflected in it.
Don’t read what everyone else is reading. Check them out later, cautiously.
This earth that we live on is full of stories in the same way that, for a fish, the ocean is full of ocean. Some people say when we are born we’re born into stories. I say we’re also born from stories.
There is a note in the front of the volume saying that no public reading may be given without first getting the author’s permission. It ought to be made much more difficult to do than that.
When we read a story, we inhabit it. The covers of the book are like a roof and four walls. What is to happen next will take place within the four walls of the story. And this is possible because the story’s voice makes everything its own.
The real reason Milton went blind was to avoid reading unsolicited manuscripts.
We don’t read novels to have an experience like life. Heck, we’re living lives, complete with all the incompleteness. We turn to fiction to have an author assure us that it means something.
If you read to your kids you’ll make readers out of them, partly because they’ll associate reading with good parent time.
No book, however good, can survive a hostile reading.
Oh no, real life is escape. The great terrors, the horrors – we hope – of your life come from reading fiction.