Erica Jong Quotes

It's possible of course, especially when you're young, to read a book and take it to your heart. And you don't need to speak to anybody about it - it's so important to you: You have found it.

I can't pick out one single book that had such a profound personal impact.

A good book ... leaves you wanting to reread the book. A great book compels you to reread your own soul.

You need to have a reader's sympathy in order to accomplish anything. It's like at a reading, I find it's better to read something funny than to read something tragic. It just goes over better because you have a finite amount of time with somebody. Of course, in a book, you have a lot of time. But you still do want to make a certain impression right when you begin.

There are books that I read years ago that enlivened things in me that haven't died yet.

What I really mean is that a great book should leave you with many experiences, and slightly exhausted at the end. You live several lives while reading it.

I think I write in order to discover on my shelf a new book that I would enjoy reading, or to see a new play that would engross me.

The adult relation to books is one of absorbing rather than being absorbed.

The reading of a fine book is an uninterrupted dialogue in which the book speaks and our soul replies.

At night, here in the library, the ghosts have voices.... The various qualities of my readings seem to permeate my every muscle, so that when I finally decide to turn off the library light, I carry into my sleep the voices and the movements of the book I've just closed.

In books I have traveled, not only to other worlds, but into my own.

[In the moment of reading writer and reader] are both briefly their best selves, or at least better selves. A flawed human being writes something and 60 years later a reader picks up the book and something in them rises to meet it.

Few things leave a deeper mark on the reader, than the first book that finds its way to his heart.

When you read a book [The Hunger Games], you create that tonal bandwidth. You set a tone for yourself, as you're reading it, in which everything exists within the world of your imagination. In the book, it's great when she can push a button and food comes up, as per your order.

I really enjoyed reading the writings of Fredrick Buechner, I havent read anything by him in probably a decade but about 20 years ago I read four or five books of his and it helped me.

Reading a great book causes jolts and frights.

Books are the mirrors of the soul.

I am sure everyone has had the experience of reading a book and finding it vibrating with aliveness, with colour and immediacy. And then, perhaps some weeks later, reading it again and finding it flat and empty. Well, the book hasn't changed: you have.

Books swept me away, this way and that, one after the other; I made endless vows according to their lights for I believed them.

A great book should leave you with many experiences.

Books can warm the heart with friendly words and counsel, entering into a close relationship with us which is articulate and alive

After all, the world is not a stage-not to me: nor a theatre: nor a show-house of any sort. And art, especially novels, are not little theatres where the reader sits aloft and watches...and sighs, commiserates, condones and smiles. That's what you want a book to be: because it leaves you so safe and superior, with your two-dollar ticket to the show. And that's what my books are not and never will be...Whoever reads me will be in the thick of the scrimmage, and if he doesn't like it if he wants a safe seat in the audience-let him read someone else.

All good books are alike in that they are truer than if they really happened and after you are finished reading one you feel that it all happened to you and after which it all belongs to you.

I think of reading a book as no less an experience than travelling or falling in love.

Reading a novel is just a much more involving and intimate experience than the act of watching a film. I mean, you literally get inside of a novelist's head, and you invest many hours to do so.