"Literature adds to reality, it does not simply describe it. It enriches the necessary competencies that daily life requires and provides; and in this ...
We read to know we are not alone.
More C. S. Lewis quotes
"We do not enjoy a story fully at the first reading.
"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.
"Naturally, since I myself am a writer, I do not wish the ordinary reader to read no modern books. But if he must read only the new or only the old, I ...
"You can never get a cup of tea large enough or a book long enough to suit me.
"A clever schoolboy's reaction to his reading is most naturally expressed by parody or imitation.
"A children's story that can only be enjoyed by children is not a good children's story in the slightest.
"Every age has its own outlook. It is specially good at seeing certain truths and specially liable to make certain mistakes. We all, therefore, need th...
"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.
"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.
"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...
"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...
"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...
"The literary man re-reads, other men simply read.
"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 ...