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Books and bookcases cropping up in stuff that I've written means that they have to be reproduced on stage or on film. This isn't as straightforward as...more

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The best moments in reading are when you come across something – a thought, a feeling, a way of looking at things – which you had thought special and ...more

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You don't put your life into your books, you find it there.

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Archbishop. Why do I never read the lesson?” “I beg your pardon, ma’am?” “In church. Everybody else gets to read and one never does. It’s not laid dow...more

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[B]riefing is not reading. In fact it is the antithesis of reading. Briefing is terse, factual and to the point. Reading is untidy, discursive and per...more

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What she was finding also was how one book led to another, doors kept opening wherever she turned and the days weren't long enough for the reading she...more

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...to her all books were the same and, as with her subjects, she felt a duty to approach them without prejudice...Lauren Bacall, Winifred Holtby, Sylv...more

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I think of literature - she wrote - as a vast country to the far borders of which I am journeying but cannot possibly reach. And I have started too la...more

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To read is to withdraw.To make oneself unavailable. One would feel easier about it if the pursuit inself were less...selfish.

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Books are not about passing time. They're about other lives. Other worlds. Far from wanting time to pass, one just wishes one had more of it. If one w...more

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The appeal of reading, she thought, lay in its indifference: there was something undeferring about literature. Books did not care who was reading them...more

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A book is a device to ignite the imagination.

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Books are not about passing the time. They're about other lives. Other worlds.