It takes hard writing to make easy reading.
There is no surer foundation for a beautiful friendship than a mutual taste in literature.
I, alone, could never have produced this book. I say this mainly in case there are lawsuits.
I do some of my best reading while seated in the bathroom.
Your job is to give people a reason to keep reading.
Newspaper readership is declining like crazy. In fact, there’s a good chance that nobody is reading my column.
There are a number of people without whom I could not have written this book, but I hope you don’t hold that against them. They are all fine people, and they had no idea how it would turn out.
I was reading this James Bond book, and right away I realized that, like most books, it had too many words.
First, a few words about this title. It isn’t easy, coming up with book titles. A lot of the really good ones are taken. Thin Thighs in 30 Days, for example. Also The Bible.
But the feeling I have, you know, is that I’ll never come close to reading all, or even a thousandth- a billionth- of the books I’d probably love if I ever got to them.
Reading computer manuals without the hardware is as frustrating as reading sex manuals without the software.
A well-stocked mind is safe from boredom.
My library is an archive of longings.
Literature was the passport to enter a larger life; that is, the zone of freedom. Literature was freedom. Especially in a time in which the values of reading and inwardness are so strenuously challenged, literature is freedom.
Most of my reading is rereading.
To read was precisely to enter another world, which was not the reader’s own, and come back refreshed, ready to bear with equanimity the injustices and frustrations of this one. Reading was balm, amusement not incitement.
Salter is a writer who particularly rewards those for whom reading is an intense pleasure. He is among the very few North American writers all of whose work I want to read, whose as-yet-unpublished books I wait for impatiently.
Reading usually precedes writing. And the impulse to write is almost always fired by reading. Reading, the love of reading, is what makes you dream of becoming a writer.
Rainy days should be spent at home with a cup of tea and a good book.
You can draw a penguin on a toilet reading The New York Times and it’s adorable, but try doing it with an adult male character, and it’s disgusting.