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And once the novelist has brought us to this state, in which, as in all purely mental states, every emotion is multiplied ten-fold, into which his boo...more

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The fault I find in our journalism is that it forces us to take an interest in some fresh triviality or other everyday, whereas only three or four boo...more

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Reading is that fruitful miracle of a communication in the midst of solitude.

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As long as reading is for us the instigator whose magic keys have opened the door to those dwelling-places deep within us that we would not have known...more

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As for me, I feel myself living and thinking in a room where everything is the creation and the language of lives profoundly different from mine, of a...more

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In reading, friendship is restored immediately to its original purity. With books there is no forced sociability. If we pass the evening with those fr...more

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A book is no mere book anymore than man can be mere man. A book was like an individual man, unmatched and with no cause of existence beyond himself.

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On no days of our childhood did we live so fully perhaps as those we thought we had left behind without living them, those that we spent with a favour...more

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No days, perhaps, of all our childhood are ever so fully lived are those that we had regarded as not being lived at all: days spent wholly with a favo...more

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There are perhaps no days of our childhood we lived so fully as those we believe we left without having lived them, those we spent with a favorite boo...more

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This book of mine has not been manufactured: it has been garnered.

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The novelist’s happy discovery was to think of substituting for those opaque sections, impenetrable by the human spirit, their equivalent in immateria...more

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In the sort of screen dappled with different states of mind which my consciousness would simultaneously unfold while I read, and which ranged from the...more

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Dinner-parties bore us because our imagination is absent, and reading interests us because it is keeping us company.

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No doubt my books too, like my mortal being, would eventually die, one day. But one has to resign oneself to dying. One accepts the thought that in te...more