To become a lifelong reader, one has to do a lot of varied and interesting reading.
I don't know which is worse, going to the library or stealing and breaking the laws of Shabbat, but I know what the prophet's talking about when he says one sin begets another.
Everyone has a story inside them. Some are bedtimes stories, some thrill and others scare and horrify their readers. Find out what your story is and share it with the world.
I am no indiscriminate novel reader. The mere trash of the common circulating library I hold in the highest contempt.
One of the most dangerous of literary ventures is the little, shy, unimportant heroine whom none of the other characters value. The danger is that your readers may agree with the other characters.
The aim I have set before me in this book is to give back to English readers the understanding of and delight in this great poet which thrilled his contemporaries and early successors.
Every novel has at least three stories. Of course, there’s story in its pages. But then there’s the story of its writing. And there’s also the story of its reaching, or not reaching, the bigger world of its readers.
Book and reader, if they meet up at the right moment, it can make sparks fly, set you alight, change your life. It can, I promise you.
Entering a library, I am always stuck by the way in which a certain vision of the world is imposed upon the reader through its categories and its order.
There is lace in every living thing: the bare branches of winter, the patterns of clouds, the surface of water as it ripples in the breeze.... Even a wild dog's matted fur shows a lacy pattern if you look at it closely enough.
Reading haiku is as much an art as writing it. The reader needs to pause and listen to the silences, to feel the spaces between the words, and to journey into the depths of many multi-colored worlds.
We live vicariously through stories, because our own lives provide so few opportunities for high-stakes adventure and noble sacrifice.
We are bored in the city, to still discover mysteries on the signs along the street, latest state of humor and poetry, requires getting damned tired... Gilles Ivain (aka Ivan Chtcheglov)
Art is magic, and art is powerful. Art saves lives- I really believe that. It gives us courage and compassion we might not have on our own.
Here too, as in the Commune almost a century earlier, the struggle was articulated around the hope that 'the antithesis between the everyday and the Festival--whether of labour or of leisure--will no longer be a basis for society.
Horror, let's face it, is basically pretty dumb. You're writing about events that are preposterous, and the trick is to dress them up in language so compelling that the reader doesn't care.
There are more hidden spaces in a city, more hidden lives and hidden emptinesses, and more darkened windows where shadow people pass fleetingly in and out of sight.
The cold rationalism simply covers for raw, wounded emotion. The more driven people are by the mind, the more they feel and further encode their feelings. The thickness of the tarpaulin cover is as the size of the emotion.
Your understanding and interpretation of [a novel] is undoubtedly unique…and that is the real beauty of the relationship that joins readers, books and writers together in a literary trinity—a bookish triumvirate.
We are raised to honor all the wrong explorers and discoverers - thieves planting flags, murderers carrying crosses. Let us at last praise the colonizers of dreams.
My brakes sound like my horn, and my car’s bumper is bumpy enough to be brail. My ideal reader would be a speed-reading blind politician I didn’t vote for.
