Lisa Kleypas Quotes

The two most common charges against the older fiction, that it pleased wickedly and that it taught nothing, had broken down before the discovery, except in illiberal sects, that the novel is fitted both for honest use and for pleasure.

People - me included - want to get excited about books. Good books are a good thing.

The person, be it gentleman or lady, who has not pleasure in a good novel, must be intolerably stupid.

There are things I read doing research, and there are certain books and writers I just love to read. There are books of Brian Morten's that I love, for instance. There's a wonderful book by an Australian writer named Helen Garner called 'The Children's Bach,' and I just love the way she uses language in it.

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

A really great popcorn movie is extremely hard to pull off. A really great popcorn book is equally hard to pull off, so I don't feel guilty devouring one.

We take literature too seriously.

I'm not sure at all that literature should be studied on the university level. ... Why should people study books? Isn't it rather silly to study Pride and Prejudice. Either you get it or you don't.

I just have to be able to follow and enjoy the writer's voice and the writer's point of view. Liking what the person has to say is not really important to me.

The pleasure we feel, reading a poem, is our assurance of its integrity.

Every time I read a Jane Austen novel, I feel like a bartender at the gates of heaven.

Maybe there is no better novel in the world than Denton Welch's In Youth Is Pleasure. Just holding it in my hands, so precious, so beyond gay, so deliciously subversive, is enough to make illiteracy a worse social crime than hunger.

Writing in India will not dramatically change till we learn to value books.

I read for pleasure and that is the moment I learn the most.

Mais enfin, bande de critiques, les livres que vous ne comprenez pas ne vaudraient-ils pas au moins que vous les signaliez? For heaven's sake, gang of critics, don't the books which you do not understand at least deserve recognition?

There's little question that short stories, like poetry, don't get the respect they deserve in the culture - but what can you do? Like Canute, one cannot fight the sea, you have to go with your love, and hope one day, things change.

You can't write well what you don't read for pleasure. If it doesn't entertain you, it's not going to entertain anyone else.

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.

Anyway, when I finished the book, I handed it in, didn't want to read it again, but when it finally was in print I felt like OK, I have to read this. And yeah, I thought God, this is petty, this is silly, too emotional, too raw...and maybe it was then, but now it all seems that it's so much better because all the stuff that felt petty and silly now seems more relevant because Andy was so important.

One should learn from a book. Books have a lot to teach us. They have a lot of empathy to impart to us, but they should also be fun. This stuff is fun! You shouldn't pick up a book and say, "Oh my god, I'm gonna better myself by reading this." You may better yourself by reading this, but who cares? Just have fun.

We must not inquire too curiously into the absolute value of literature. Enough that it amuses and exercises us. At least it leaves us where we were. It names things, but does not add things.

It is usual to speak in a playfully apologetic tone about one's adult enjoyment of what are called 'children's books.' I think the convention a silly one. 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-except, of course, books of information. The only imaginative works we ought to grow out of are those which it would have been better not to have read at all. A mature palate will probably not much care for crème de menthe: but it ought still to enjoy bread and butter and honey.

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

The test of real literature is that it will bear repetition. We read over the same pages again and again, and always with fresh delight.

I grew up on a mixed diet of mass and class, and I still read that way. I hate it when people apologize for what they read. Some bestsellers aren't exactly literary. So what? They're fun and rip-roaring, Who instituted the book police and why do we have to answer them? Grrrrr!