Alcohol makes other people less tedious, and food less bland, and can help provide what the Greeks called entheos, or the slight buzz of inspiration when reading or writing.
The reading public isn’t born that doesn’t think foreigners are either funny or faintly sinister.
I tend not to read or watch Science Fiction, particularly not comedy Science Fiction. The point is that if it’s less good than what I do, there’s no point in reading it, if it’s better than what I do it makes me depressed.
I read anything that’s going to be interesting. But you don’t know what it is until you’ve read it. Somewhere in a book on the history of false teeth there’ll be the making of a novel.
I discovered fantasy and science fiction when I was about 10, and read nothing else for about three years. I ran out of all the books that there were to read in the library. I was keen on reading stuff that took me to other places.
You have to have really wide reading habits and pay attention to the news and just everything that’s going on in the world: you need to. If you get this right, then the writing is a piece of cake.
I know that I am a small, weak man, but I have amassed a large library; I dream of dangerous places.
She wasn’t doing a thing that I could see, except standing there leaning on the balcony railing, holding the universe together.
What really knocks me out is a book that, when you’re all done reading it, you wish the author that wrote it was a terrific friend of yours and you could call him up on the phone whenever you felt like it. That doesn’t happen much, though.
I’ll read my books and I’ll drink coffee and I’ll listen to music, and I’ll bolt the door.
God, how I still love private readers. It’s what we all used to be.
You think of the book you’d most like to be reading, and then you sit down and shamelessly write it.
Learning to read is probably the most difficult and revolutionary thing that happens to the human brain and if you don’t believe that, watch an illiterate adult try to do it.
I guess there are never enough books.
Charley is a mind-reading dog. There have been many trips in his lifetime, and often he has to be left at home. He knows we are going long before the suitcase has come out, and he paces and worries and whines and goes into a state of mild hysteria.
A man who tells secrets or stories must think of who is hearing or reading, for a story has as many versions as it has readers.
This is not a novel to be tossed aside lightly. It should be thrown with great force.
I like best to have one book in my hand, and a stack of others on the floor beside me, so as to know the supply of poppy and mandragora will not run out before the small hours.
I don’t want to review books any more. It cuts in too much on my reading.
Nevil Shute’s On the Beach is no Christmas carol, but it seems to me a remarkably fine novel, one which I read, in the peculiarly repulsive phrase, with my eyes glued to the page.