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.
I have done what people do, my life makes a reasonable showing. Can I go back to my books now?
My impulse now, as then, is to disagree. The majority of people in this country who haunt bookstores, go to readings and book festivals or simply read in the privacy of their homes are not traumatized exiles.
Time past and time future What might have been and what has been Point to one end, which is always present.” (Four Quartets)
I have never read The Joy of Crap. Sounds disgusting. I have, however, read The Joy of Sex. Not in a while, but I think it's one of those classics you can come back to again... and again.
