Books, for me, are a home. Books don’t make a home – they are one, in the sense that just as you do with a door, you open a book, and you go inside. Inside there is a different kind of time and a different kind of space.
If you continually write and read yourself as a fiction, you can change what’s crushing you.
In the library I felt better, words you could trust and look at till you understood them, they couldn’t change half way through a sentence like people, so it was easier to spot a lie.
Yes, the stories are dangerous, she was right. A book is a magic carpet that flies you off elsewhere. A book is a door. You open it. You step through. Do you come back?
I go on writing so that I will always have something to read.
In a world where meaning is often absent or imposed, reading offers a dialogue with ourselves, with society, with history, and with the dead.
Reading is a rendezvous with your soul.
I didn’t want to tell the story of myself, but someone I called myself. If you read yourself as fiction, it’s rather more liberating than reading yourself as fact.
Books and doors are the same thing. You open them, and you go through into another world.
Reading is where the wild things are.
Reading takes solitude and it takes focus.
The forbidden things were a great influence on my life. I was forbidden from reading A Catcher in the Rye.
The true felicity of a lover of books is the luxurious turning of page by page, the surrender, not meanly abject, but deliberate and cautious, with your wits about you, as you deliver yourself into the keeping of the book. This I call reading.
I tend to write first drafts that are incredibly cognitive, very rational, very boring. They come off as justification. Like, ‘This is my idea and here’s all the reasons that it’s right.’ It doesn’t make for very compelling reading.
We of this age have discovered a shorter, and more prudent method to become scholars and wits, without the fatigue of reading or of thinking.
Argument, as usually managed, is the worst sort of conversation, as in books it is generally the worst sort of reading.
There’s so much more to a book than just the reading.
I find the only thing that really stands up, better than gambling, better than booze, better than women, is reading.
Reading keeps me sane. Growing up, it was my scape, my alternative; it provided both rebellion and peace.
I did a lot of reading. I read about democratic socialism. And I read about the efforts of people for such a long time trying to create a society in which all people can live with dignity. And that’s kind of what I believe.