I’ve given up reading books. I find it takes my mind off myself.
The only thing that everyone needs to look out for is keeping the students reading through high school and thereafter.
I’ve purposely stayed away from reading much about postmodern theory, and most everything I have read just bored me to tears. I don’t think anybody’s written about it, or very few have, with any verve.
You have what I can afford to give. You are a panhandler, begging for anything, and I am the man walking briskly by, tossing a quarter or so into your paper cup. I can afford to give you this. This does not break me.
High school teachers who want to get reluctant readers turned around need to give the students some say in the reading list. Make it collaborative: The students will feel ownership, and everyone will dig in.
Reading was my escape and my comfort, my consolation, my stimulant of choice: reading for the pure pleasure of it, for the beautiful stillness that surrounds you when you hear an author’s words reverberating in your head.
When you’re young, you keep reading new writers and you keep changing your mind about how you ought to sound.
To care about words, to have a stake in what is written, to believe in the power of books – this overwhelms the rest, and beside it one’s life becomes very small.
I started out in life as a poet; I was only writing poetry all through my 20s. It wasn’t until I was about 30 that I got serious about writing prose. While I was writing poems, I would often divert myself by reading detective novels; I liked them.
Censors never go after books unless kids already like them. I don’t even think they know to go after books until they know that children are interested in reading this book, therefore there must be something in it that’s wrong.
I owe everything I am and everything I will ever be to books.
It was as though I had been dying of thirst and the librarian had handed me a five gallon bucket of water. I drank and drank. The only reason I am here and not in prison is because of that woman. I was a loser, but she showed me the power of reading.
I go to books and to nature as the bee goes to a flower, for a nectar that I can make into my own honey.
How much there is in books that one does not want to know, that it would be a mere weariness and burden to the spirit to know.
When I work, I’m just translating the world around me in what seems to be straightforward terms. For my readers, this is sometimes a vision that’s not familiar. But I’m not trying to manipulate reality. This is just what I see and hear.
Reading a book is like re-writing it for yourself. You bring to a novel, anything you read, all your experience of the world. You bring your history and you read it in your own terms.
Reading a book is like re-writing it for yourself.
Everybody else is working to change, persuade, tempt and control them. The best readers come to fiction to be free of all that noise.
To read a novel requires a certain kind of concentration, focus, devotion to the reading. If you read a novel in more than two weeks, you don’t read the novel really.
Force yourself to reflect on what you read, paragraph by paragraph.