Raymond Chandler Quotes

All reading for pleasure is entertainment.

I do not feel obliged in my reading. I read to be entertained and to relax, and to go into another world, not because it's good for me.

Literature is my Utopia. Here I am not disenfranchised. No barrier of the senses shuts me out from the sweet, gracious discourses of my book friends. They talk to me without embarrassment or awkwardness.

I am glad and thankful that my husband forced me to start reading for pleasure, as it took me years to listen to him and pick up a book!

I read for interest and enjoyment, and when I cease to enjoy it I stop.

I read serious books, but every now and then, I read just for fun.

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

I don't want to review books any more. It cuts in too much on my reading.

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.

Reading a good long novel is in many ways like having a long and satisfying affair

My mother read secondarily for information; she sank as a hedonist into novels. She read Dickens in the spirit in which she would have eloped with him.

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.

This is not about money or anything other than the pleasure of reading for people who want to read it.

No man reads a book of science from pure inclination. The books that we do read with pleasure are light compositions, which contain a quick succession of events.

And you love to read, you love to escape, right?

One of my passions is that children enjoy their time at school - and reading for pleasure can be an important part of that.

The clerisy are those who seek, and find, delight and enlargement of life in books. The clerisy are those for whom reading is a personal art.

I escaped the torture of my childhood home by reading. To this day it is still one of my greatest pleasures.

Libraries, whether my own or shared with a greater reading public, have always seemed to me pleasantly mad places, and for as long as I can remember I've been seduced by their labyrinthine logic, which suggests that reason (if not art) rules over a cacophonous arrangement of books.

To encounter a fine book and have time to read it is a wonderful thing.

It can't be supposed," said Joe. "Tho' I'm oncommon fond of reading, too." Are you, Joe?" Oncommon. Give me," said Joe, "a good book, or a good newspaper, and sit me down afore a good fire, and I ask no better. Lord!" he continued, after rubbing his knees a little, "when you do come to a J and a O, and says you, 'Here, at last, is a J-O, Joe,' how interesting reading is!

[On William Lyon Phelps's Happiness:] It is second only to a rubber duck as the ideal bathtub companion. It may be held in the hand without causing muscular fatigue ... and it may be read through before the water has cooled. And if it slips down the drain pipe, all right, it slips down the drain pipe.

People read books to escape the uncertainties of life.

There is a temperate zone in the mind, between luxurious indolence and exacting work; and it is to this region, just between laziness and labor, that summer reading belongs.

When I say to a parent, "read to a child", I don't want it to sound like medicine. I want it to sound like chocolate.