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With me, travelling is frankly a vice. The temptation to indulge in it is one which I find almost as hard to resist as the temptation to read promiscu...more

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Thanks to words we have been able to rise above the brutes and thanks to words we have often sunk to the level of the demons.

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Words, words, words! They shut one off from the universe. Three quarters of the time one’s never in contact with things, only with the beastly words t...more

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Thanks to words, we have been able to rise above the brutes; and thanks to words, we have often sunk to the level of the demons.

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Everyone who knows how to read has it in their power to magnify themselves to multiply the ways in which they exist to make their life full signifi...more

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Writers write to influence their readers their preachers their auditors but always at bottom to be more themselves.

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Back to culture. Yes, actually to culture. You can’t consume much if you sit still and read books.

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I believe one would write better if the climate were bad. If there were a lot of wind and storms for example...

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The strange words rolled through his mind; rumbled, like talking thunder; like the drums at the summer dances, if the drums could have spoken; like th...more

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Disappointed in his hope that I would give him the fictional equivalent of “One Hundred Ways of Cooking Eggs” or the “Carnet de la Ménagère,” he began...more

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Human contacts have been so highly valued in the past only because reading was not a common accomplishment and because books were scarce and difficult...more

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What a gulf between impression and expression! That’s our ironic fate—to have Shakespearean feelings and (unless by some billion-to-one chance we happ...more

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Deprived of their newspapers or a novel, reading-addicts will fall back onto cookery books, on the literature which is wrapped around bottles of paten...more