Lin Yutang Quotes

I'm not a masochistic reader. If something is just too dense or not enjoyable, even though I'm told it should be good for me, I'll put it down. That said, most of what I read would be considered high-end or good for you, I suppose. But, I also think that reading should be enjoyable.

You're more likely to finish a book you enjoy, than one that feels like literary drudgery.

Reading is not a duty, and has consequently no business to be made disagreeable.

Fools have a habit of believing that everything written by a famous author is admirable. For my part I read only to please myself and like only what suits my taste.

Reading should be a repeat performance.

The mere brute pleasure of reading the sort of pleasure a cow must have in grazing.

Schools and parents can team up to find books that kids will really get excited about - that will make them say, 'That was a great experience. Now I know why people get excited about reading.'

I had started to feel that somewhere in the second half of the 20th century, the idea of page-turning as a good thing had been lost. You were getting books that were the equivalent of absolutely beautifully prepared dishes of food that didn't taste like anything much.

Finding people who get enormous pleasure from reading books is a more and more unusual experience, and so writers just so much want to be heard.

My favorite is always the book that I'm currently reading.

I'd like for the young people, and older ones, too, who don't count themselves as readers, to know the joy of reading and what it does to enrich your life in so many ways.

My criteria for what makes a book an official 'favorite,' is based almost entirely on how desperately I don't want the story to end.

There are many reluctant young readers who haven't yet found books that make them laugh.

I'm happy to see book clubs on TV. Talking about books has always been an important and invigorating part of reading them, and it's nice that that is getting attention from the media.

I didn't really like reading much before I did 'The Golden Compass'. But then my teacher told me to read it. And I thought, 'Oh God, I'm going to have to read a whole book by myself!' It's not that I couldn't read, it's just that I didn't really like books very much. But the book that she lent me I really enjoyed.

The first time I read an excellent work, it is to me just as if I gained a new friend; and when I read over a book I have perused before, it resembles the meeting of an old one.

The greatest pleasure of reading consists in re-reading.

Any writer who gives a reader a pleasurable experience is doing every other writer a favor because it will make the reader want to read other books. I am all for it.

When I think of the books I love, there's always a little laughter in the dark.

If one cannot enjoy reading a book over and over again, there is no use in reading it at all.

I would like my novels to be read the way I read the novels I love.

I read the novel 'Miracle at St. Anna' when it was first released, and I loved it.

I figured I could read more than five pages tonight since I'd been deprived for the last couple of days. When I finished the fifteenth, I discovered I was three pages from the next chapter. Might as well end with a clean break. After I was done, I sighed and leaned back, feeling decadent and spent. Pure bliss. Books were a lot less messy than orgasms.

I'm not a fast reader. I like to linger over each sentence, enjoying the style. If I don't enjoy the writing, I stop.

So this is supposed to be about the how, and when, and why, and what of reading -- about the way that, when reading is going well, one book leads to another and to another, a paper trail of theme and meaning; and how, when it's going badly, when books don't stick or take, when your mood and the mood of the book are fighting like cats, you'd rather do anything but attempt the next paragraph, or reread the last one for the tenth time.