This must be a gift book. That is to say a book, which you wouldn’t take on any other terms.
When the book comes out it may hurt you – but in order for me to do it, it had to hurt me first. I can only tell you about yourself as much as I can face about myself.
Librarians are tour-guides for all of knowledge.
Shout for libraries. Shout for the young readers who use them.
I have good reason to be content, for thank God I can read and perhaps understand Shakespeare to his depths.
Writing in English is the most ingenious torture ever devised for sins committed in previous lives. The English reading public explains the reason why.
The demand that I make of my reader is that he should devote his whole Life to reading my works.
So you need hardly spell me how every word will be bound over to carry three score and ten toptypsical readings throughout the book of Doublends Jined.
I really like older writers, perhaps because they take me out of my element. I don’t have a great deal of interest in reading a fictionalized present as it’s pretty insane as it is.
I think I am the most impressed with writing styles that defy category, like Kharms or Selby, Breton or Jarry, where you become as interested in the writer as much as the writing itself. It’s all these things that make reading so appealing to me.
I have always identified with Joan Didion’s depiction of Los Angeles and Southern California, ever since reading ‘Play It As It Lays,’ ‘Slouching Towards Bethlehem’ and ‘The White Album.’
To justify being listened to, I try to be as well informed as I can. Hence, the travel. Reading is good too. Reading gets you part way there, and I do read pretty voraciously for a guy who’s trying to write so much.
I’ve been reading an Alabama newspaper that one man shot another man because he beat him in a Bible-quoting competition.
We are digital archives of the African Pliocene, even of Devonian seas; walking repositories of wisdom out of the old days. You could spend a lifetime reading in this ancient library and die unsated by the wonder of it.
I couldn’t live a week without a private library – indeed, I’d part with all my furniture and squat and sleep on the floor before I’d let go of the 1500 or so books I possess.
For thee I dim these eye and stuff this head With all such reading as was never read.
I had plenty of pimples as a kid. One day I fell asleep in the library. When I woke up, a blind man was reading my face.
What a dog I got. Last night he went on the paper four times – three while I was reading it.
Sleep is good, he said, And books are better.
Reading. That was the sport I was good at.