It’s just a matter of writing the kind of book I enjoy reading. Something better be happening at the beginning, and then on every page after, or I get irritated.
I am re-reading Henry James as a change from history. I began with Daisy Miller, and I’ve just finished Washington Square. What a brilliant, painful book.
If I had to give up reading or give up listening to music, I suspect I’d stick with the music.
Reading is not walking on the words; it’s grasping the soul of them.
Reading the word and learning how to write the word so one can later read it are preceded by learning how to write the world, that is having the experience of changing the world and touching the world.
I don’t read novels whilst I’m writing one; I just haven’t got a wide enough brain to concentrate on incoming and outgoing in the same time zone.
I came from a house full of books, so I took reading for granted. I was an outdoorsy little kid, too, so I got the best of both worlds by taking books up trees and reading there.
Failure to grasp centrifugal meaning is incomplete reading; failure to grasp centripetal meaning is incompetent reading.
Those who do succeed in reading the Bible from beginning to end will discover that at least it has a beginning and an end, and some traces of a total structure.
I don’t think any good book is based on factual experience. Bad books are about things the writer already knew before he wrote them.
Reading, writing, teaching, learning, are all activities aimed at introducing civilizations to each other.
A library book, I imagine, is a happy book.
The book she had been reading was under her pillow, pressing its cover against her ear as if to lure her back into its printed pages.
She read and read and read, but she was stuffing herself with the letters on the page like an unhappy child stuffing itself with chocolate. They didn’t taste bad, but she was still unhappy.
So it’s happened, I kept thinking, you’re in the middle of a story exactly as you’ve always wanted, and it’s horrible. Fear tastes quite different when you’re not just reading about it, Meggie, and playing hero wasn’t half as much fun as I’d expected.
Weren’t all books ultimately related? After all, the same letters filled them, just arranged in a different order. Which meant that, in a certain way, every book was contained in every other!
I grew up reading genre writers, and to the degree that Eric Ambler and Graham Greene are genre writers, I’m a genre writer.
I read all the time. People ask, ‘Do you read while you work?’ And I say, ‘I better.’ I take two or three years to finish one of my enormous books, and I can’t go that long without reading.
When you’re reading, you’re not where you are; you’re in the book. By the same token, I can write anywhere.
There is nothing more distressing or tiresome than a writer standing in front of an audience and reading his work.