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It is a good rule after reading a new book, never to allow yourself another new one till you have read an old one in between.

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We read to know we are not alone.

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In order to pronounce a book bad it is not enough to discover that it elicits no good response from ourselves, for that might be our fault.

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The first demand any work of art makes upon us is surrender. Look. Listen. Receive. Get yourself out of the way. (There is no good asking first whethe...more

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The true reader reads every work seriously in the sense that he reads it whole-heartedly, makes himself as receptive as he can. But for that very reas...more

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For I need not remind such an audience as this that the neat sorting out of books into age-groups, so dear to publishers, has only a very sketchy rela...more

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The literary man re-reads, other men simply read.

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It is very rarely that a middle-aged man finds an author who gives him, what he knew so often in his teens and twenties, the sense of having opened a ...more

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An unliterary man may be defined as one who reads books once only. . . . We do not enjoy a story fully at the first reading. Not till the curiosity, t...more

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We may be sure that the characteristic blindness of the twentieth century - the blindness about which posterity will ask, "But how could they have tho...more

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A young man who wishes to remain a sound atheist cannot be too careful of his reading.

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The truly wide taste in reading is that which enables a man to find something for his needs on the sixpenny tray outside any secondhand bookshop.

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The truly wide taste in reading is that which enables a man to find something for his needs on the sixpenny tray outside any secondhand bookshop. The ...more

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Literature adds to reality, it does not simply describe it. It enriches the necessary competencies that daily life requires and provides; and in this ...more

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No book is really worth reading at the age of ten which is not equally – and often far more – worth reading at the age of fifty and beyond.