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To me, re-reading my favorite books is like spending time with my best friends.I’d never be satisfied to limit myself to just one experience each with...more

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We read to know we are not alone.

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I am a product [...of] endless books. My father bought all the books he read and never got rid of any of them. There were books in the study, books in...more

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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 man who is contented to be only himself, and therefore less a self, is in prison. My own eyes are not enough for me, I will see through those of o...more

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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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Even in literature and art, no man who bothers about originality will ever be original: whereas if you simply try to tell the truth (without caring tw...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.