Writing and reading decrease our sense of isolation. They deepen and widen and expand our sense of life: they feed the soul.
Writing and reading decrease our sense of isolation. It’s like singing on a boat during a terrible storm at sea. You can’t stop the raging storm, but singing can change the hearts and spirits of the people who are together on that ship.
I devoured books like a person taking vitamins, afraid that otherwise I would remain this gelatinous narcissist, with no possibility of ever becoming thoughtful, of ever being taken seriously.
E-books are great for instant gratification – you see a review somewhere of a book that interests you, and you can start reading it five minutes later.
There are a lot of us, some published, some not, who think the literary life is the loveliest one possible, this life of reading and writing and corresponding. We think this life is nearly ideal.
Reading poetry and reading the great works of the canon that we were reading in the ’60s and the ’70s and ’80s was mind altering.
My father was a writer, so I grew up writing and reading and I was really encouraged by him.
Take Time Out. It’s not a real vacation if you’re reading email or calling in for messages.
Words are, of course, the most powerful drug used by mankind.
What is the moral? Who rides may read.
A bookstore is one of the only pieces of evidence we have that people are still thinking.
The big advantage of a book is that it’s very easy to rewind. Close it and you’re right back at the beginning.
To read without reflecting is like eating without digesting.
I had walked into that reading-room a happy, healthy man. I crawled out a decrepit wreck.
What readers ask nowadays in a book is that it should improve, instruct, and elevate. This book wouldn’t elevate a cow.
To read a newspaper is to refrain from reading something worth while. The first discipline of education must therefore be to refuse resolutely to feed the mind with canned chatter.
Reading is one of the most individual things that happens. So every reader is going to read a piece in a slightly different way, sometimes a radically different way.
A word after a word after a word is power.
I meet a lot of readers who first encountered my work in school. And I can only assume there is another group who would run away very fast if they saw me coming, for exactly the same reason. Reading is individual, and not all tastes are alike.
The answers you get from literature depend on the questions you pose.