When at last I came upon the right book, the feeling was violent: it blew open a hole in me that made life more dangerous because I couldn’t control what came through it.
To me, this is the singular privilege of reading literature: we are allowed to step into another’s life.
That’s what I do. Watch movies and read. Sometimes I even pretend to write, but I’m not fooling anyone. Oh, and I go to the mailbox.
I had passed through the entire British education system studying literature, culminating in three years of reading English at Oxford, and they’d never told me about something as basic as the importance of point of view in fiction!
You don’t read it in the sense of reading a message; it doesn’t work like that. What’s happening is that the Shadows are responding to the attention you pay them.
When you’re reading a book, you’re always looking for the natural place to stop. With a movie, you can’t really have that sense of it coming momentarily to a halt; there’s pressure to keep the momentum up.
A book lives as long as it is unfathomed.
I can’t bear art that you can walk round and admire. A book should be either a bandit or a rebel or a man in the crowd.
Reading is the sole means by which we slip, involuntarily, often helplessly, into another’s skin, another’s voice, another’s soul.
Yes, I’ve listened to just a few audiobooks – but hope to listen to more. I’ve wanted to investigate how my own books sound in this format and find the experience of listening, and not reading, quite fascinating.
I am always reading or thinking about reading.
I don’t read for amusement, I read for enlightenment. I do a lot of reviewing, so I have a steady assignment of reading. I’m also a judge for the Anisfield-Wolf Book Awards, which gives awards to literature and nonfiction.
All that matters in life is forging deep ties of love and family and friends. Writing and reading come later.
I read books. Avidly, ardently! As if my life depended upon it.
People can lose their lives in libraries. They ought to be warned.
Associate with the noblest people you can find; read the best books; live with the mighty; but learn to be happy alone.
I seek in the reading of books, only to please myself, by an honest diversion.
He that I am reading seems always to have the most force.
All the world knows me in my book, and my book in me.
And if nobody reads me, shall I have wasted my time, when I have beguiled so many idle hours with such pleasant and profitable reflections?