I was not a great student at the University of Chicago. I think that is – the record will bare me out. But I spent a lot of time reading history, sociology, psychology – reading everything except what I was supposed to read for class the next day.
I was a very difficult child, and the time I spent reading was about the only peace I gave my mother.
As long as I’m reading, I’m at home.
It’s good to know how to read, but it’s dangerous to know how to read and not how to interpret what you’re reading.
Every time there’s a revolution, it comes from somebody reading a book about revolution. David Walker wrote a book and Nat Turner did his thing.
I don’t read horror, ever. When I was 15, I made the mistake of reading part of ‘The Exorcist.’ It was the first and last horror book I’ve ever opened.
What kind of life can you have in a house without books?
If one reads enough books one has a fighting chance. Or better, one’s chances of survival increase with each book one reads.
Writing and reading is to me synonymous with existing.
Literature is news that stays news.
Properly, we should read for power. Man reading should be man intensely alive. The book should be a ball of light in one’s hand.
No man understands a deep book until he has seen and lived at least part of its contents.
Great literature is simply language charged with meaning to the utmost possible degree.
With one day’s reading a man may have the key in his hands.
This is no book. Whoever touches this touches a man.
Anyone who is too lazy to master the comparatively small glossary necessary to understand Chaucer deserves to be shut out from the reading of good books forever.
The book shd. be a ball of light in one’s hand.
Some of the most famous books are the least worth reading. Their fame was due to their having done something that needed to be doing in their day. The work is done and the virtue of the book has expired.
Books and marriage go ill together.
The only people who can be excused for letting a bad book loose on the world are the poor devils who have to write for a living.