George Murray Quotes

In reading, we are both scientists and poets.

All they want to do is tie the poem to a chair with a rope and torture a confession out of it. They begin beating it with a hose to find out what it really means.

Some books are to be tasted, others to be swallowed, and some few to be chewed and digested.

If you will read again what is written, you will see how it was.

Rereading, we find a new book.

I do think digital media encourages speed-reading, which can be fine if one is simply seeking information. But a serious novel or work of history or volume of poetry is an experience one should savor, take time over.

The answers you get from literature depend on the questions you pose.

The greatest texts, I think, first dazzle, then with careful rereading, they instruct. I have learned from Virginia Woolf more than I even know how to articulate.

Be sure that you go to the author to get at his meaning, not to find yours.

Vladimir Nabokov on 'Bleak House' or Henry James on 'The House of the Seven Gables' prove that reading can be an exciting subject in itself, full of passionate encounters, contradictory judgments, striking discoveries, and unexpected reversals.

Good readers make much out of little.

Don't explain your author, read him right and he explains himself.

Some people spend their entire lives reading but never get beyond reading the words on the page, they don't understand that the words are merely stepping stones placed across a fast-flowing river, and the reason they're there is so that we can reach the farther shore, it's the other side that matters...

Learning how to be a good reader is what makes you a writer.

He taught me literature, and he actually taught me how to read. He was my personal mentor.

Reading is an active, imaginative act; it takes work.

The more I like a book, the more slowly I read. this spontaneous talking back to a book is one of the things that makes reading so valuable.

It's good to know how to read, but it's dangerous to know how to read and not how to interpret what you're reading.

The most important thing is to read as much as you can, like I did. It will give you an understanding of what makes good writing and it will enlarge your vocabulary.

Algebra looked like Chinese characters to me, and I could never get into reading Shakespeare. I just did not get it.

I think there's something about studying a book which will kill it if you're not careful.

Literature is analysis after the event.

What I am best at is reading a book and then writing a critical essay.

I'm not really a good reader. What I mean is, I think I'm not one of those people who can read a story and analyze it just like that.

The writer studies literature, not the world. He is careful of what he reads, for that is what he will write.