Catherynne M. Valente Quotes

Reading should be a repeat performance.

I love to read things that I'm sure won't make a movie.

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

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

It's not a terribly original thing to say, but I love Raymond Carver. For one thing, he's fun to read out loud.

If I couldn't use food or love to define contentment, I would use reading.

I've got to hear the rhythm of the sentences; I want the music of the prose. I want to see ordinary things transformed not by the circumstances in which I see them but by the language with which they're described. That's what I love when I read.

Most scholarly books we read for the information or insight they contain. But some we return to simply for the pleasure of the author's company.

I think of reading like a balanced diet; if your sentences are too baggy, too baroque, cut back on fatty Foster Wallace, say, and pick up Kafka as roughage.

Of course there is no denying the possible pleasure of holing up with a fat, slow-moving, mediocre novel; still, we all know that we can indulge ourselves in that fashion only so much. In the end, we read not for reading's sake, but to learn.

There are two motives for reading a book; one, that you enjoy it; the other, that you can boast about it.

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.

In the highest civilization the book is still the highest delight.

Liquid, flowing words are the choicest and the best, if language is regarded as music. But when it is considered as a picture, then there are rough words which are very telling, they make their mark.

What moves me most is style: the quality of the writing rather than the story being told.

The idea of writing, to me, was, from the beginning, was writing something which was a little different from the ordinary exchange of speech. It was something that had a certain formality, something in which the words were of interest in themselves.

I read a lot of the books that I love again and again and again and try to understand how the writer did it.

I prefer a great novel, but many novels come with a bunch of novel-y writerliness that feels sort of macho to me, so I do end up reading lots of shorter things.

Good style in prose is always hostage to the precision, speed, and laconic intensity of poetic diction.

If, in the very first pages, I'm forced to read gratuitous phrases or banal metaphors, I won't be able to get inside the story. Only if the sentences 'sparkle' can I get hooked.

I love Joy Williams, Lorrie Moore: such great short-story writers.

Once you create this thing between duty and reading, it's over. Reading's over.

I'll read anything Anne Carson writes, anything J. M. Coetzee writes, and anything Cormac McCarthy writes. I'll drop whatever I'm doing to read a new Mary Ruefle essay.

One of the great rewards of a writer's life is that it lets you read all the books you want to without feeling guilty.

I love to read the kind of books I write. Genre-breaking. Fresh-concept. World-building. My all-time top three authors would have to be Cormac McCarthy, Thomas Harris, and Pat Conroy.