I started reading my manuscripts out loud, to hear what they sounded like. If the text flows with little effort, then I am satisfied, but if I keep stumbling and stuttering while I read, then I rewrite.
One glance he gave, one little smile at parting—it was but for a moment; but therein I read, or thought I read, a meaning that kindled in my heart a brighter flame of hope than had ever yet arisen.
Lord Polonius: What do you read, my lord? Hamlet: Words, words, words. Lord Polonius: What is the matter, my lord? Hamlet: Between who? Lord Polonius: I mean, the matter that you read, my lord.
the focus one finds in the grammar books is on the wrong forms, on forms detached from the underlying (or overarching) form that must be in place before any technical terms can be meaningful or alive
Well-wrought poems and works of imaginative literature can do for us what stone-cold prose can never do. They can help us grasp the full dimension of ways of life other than our own.
Oh! it is absurd to have a hard-and-fast rule about what one should read and what one shouldn't. More than half of modern culture depends on what one shouldn't read.
The writing of novels is one of the few ways I have found to approach the altar of God and Creation itself. You try to worship God by performing the singularly courageous and impossible favor of knowing yourself.
Books act like a developing fluid on film. That is, they bring into consciousness what you didn’t know you knew.
I am a man without many pleasures in life, a man whose few pleasures are small, but a man whose small pleasures are very important to him. One of them is eating. One reading. Another reading while eating.
The danger in reviewing and teaching literature for a living (is) you can develop a kind of knee-jerk superiority to the material you're "decoding
Meekly swallowing and assimilating the customs of the more powerful has always been a strategy by which the less powerful have tried to fit in.
Those straight-spined parishioners could justify their exhibitionism by telling themselves that they were setting an example, even educating the rest of us.
I think the influence of books is neither direct and more predictable. Books themselves are too unruly, and so are readers.
Generations of readers, bored with their own alienating, repetitious jobs, have been mesmerized by Crusoe's essential, civilization-building chores.
I have no feelings of guilt regarding the books I have not read and perhaps will never read; I know that my books have unlimited patience. They will wait for me till the end of my days.
Those who scorn you taunt only themselves -- I knew this without reading one word; because in reading one is reminded of the truth man is given at birth -- by man I mean man and woman.
Personally, I am a hedonistic reader; I have never read a book merely because it was ancient. I read books for the aesthetic emotions they offer me, and I ignore the commentaries and criticism.
Goodness, Mr. Cellini, I've not time to answer all these questions. I've got to get on.' With what? She seldom did anything but read, as far as he knew. She must have read thousands of books, she was always at it.
Antonia José Bolivar préférait ne plus penser, laissant béantes les profondeurs de sa mémoire pour les remplir de bonheur et de tourments d'amour plus éternels que le temps.
I once overheard someone telling someone else "Don't confuse kindness with something else." Even though this was not directed at me, I took heed and never hedged my bets.
We invent fictions in order to live somehow the many lives we would like to lead when we barely have one at our disposal.
