I spent much of my childhood in northern Quebec, and often there was no radio, no television – there wasn’t a lot to entertain us. When it rained, I stayed inside reading, writing, drawing.
It is my contention that the process of reading is part of the process of writing, the necessary completion without which writing can hardly be said to exist.
Repeat reading for me shares a few things with hot-water bottles and thumbsucking: comfort, familiarity, the recurrence of the expected.
Perhaps they were looking for passion; perhaps they delved into this book as into a mysterious parcel – a gift box at the bottom of which, hidden in layers of rustling tissue paper, lay something they’d always longed for but couldn’t ever grasp.
A reader can never tell if it’s a real thimble or an imaginary thimble, because by the time you’re reading it, they’re the same. It’s a thimble. It’s in the book.
There are perhaps no days of our childhood we lived so fully as those we spent with a favorite book.
Every reader finds himself. The writer’s work is merely a kind of optical instrument that makes it possible for the reader to discern what, without this book, he would perhaps never have seen in himself.
Reading is that fruitful miracle of a communication in the midst of solitude.
They like my books better in England than in France; a translation would be very successful there.
A man of letters, merely by reading a phrase, can estimate exactly the literary merit of its author.
In reality, every reader is, while reading, the reader of his own self.
A book is not completed till it’s read.
A book is a version of the world. If you do not like it, ignore it; or offer your own version in return.
Reading is a very different thing than performing. In fact, one of the things I think that doesn’t work in books on tape is if the person doing the reading “acts” too much; it becomes irritating to you listening to it.
Be sure that you go to the author to get at his meaning, not to find yours.
I write books I’d enjoy reading, I’m the reader standing behind my shoulder.
People are always telling me that they’ve seen people reading my books on the subway, or the beach, or whenever.
I grew up kissing books and bread.
I grew up reading ‘The Jungle Books’ and loving them.
My first novel – the novel I wrote before ‘Midnight’s Children’ – feels, to me, now, very – I mean, I get embarrassed when I see people reading it. You know, there are some people who, bizarrely, like it. Which I’m, you know, I’m happy for.