Alain de Botton Quotes

I love and care about literature, and great writers are our teachers. You're studying their mind when you read their work.

I'm not sure I'm happy with words such as "task" or "role" when they are attached to literature.

[To become a poet] The most important thing is to pay attention. The next would probably be to read; it's so important to pay attention. It keeps you from being bored, and I might add it keeps you from being boorish.

Literature is less involved in giving you answers and more dedicated to giving you insight.

Rebecca Mead's My Life in Middlemarch is a wise, humane, and delightful study of what some regard as the best novel in English. Mead has discovered an original and highly personal way to make herself an inhabitant both of the book and of George Eliot's imaginary city. Though I have read and taught the book these many years I find myself desiring to go back to it after reading Rebecca Mead's work.

All the things worth writing about are outside me. I'm a lens, not a source. And even if it's not always a comfortable journey, it's always a stimulating one.

Books guided my life from high school, and the greatest, most interesting, most provocative, funniest, smartest people who ever lived in the last 200 or 300 years wrote those books. I would fall in love with Victor Hugo and read not just 'Les Miserables,' but 'Bug-Jargal' and 'The Toilers of the Sea' and so forth.

I don't think of myself as a critic at all. I'm a reviewer and essayist. I mainly hope to share with others my pleasure in the books and authors I write about, though sometimes I do need to cavil and point out shortcomings.

A book is sent out into the world, and there is no way of fully anticipating the responses it will elicit. Consider the responses called forth by the Bible, Homer, Shakespeare - let alone contemporary poetry or a modern novel.

I feel like reading really defined me as a writer because I lived my life outside of my own body for so much of my life and I loved it. I've always been a reader. I think living all those stories served me to naturally take that next step to creating.

Basically, I tend to see the world differently to other people, and I write books and stories to alter the imagination of people so that they also see the world in a different way.

As a younger person, I was obsessed with Ray Bradbury, and I think his stories did more to shape me as a storyteller than anybody else - even though, when I read them now, a lot of them seem overly sentimental. But that's probably the writer that I've thought about the most, even though I don't necessarily like a lot of his work.

A writer is an eternal outsider, his nose pressed against whatever window on the other side of which he sees his material.

A great artist transforms our world, removes scales from our eyes, plugs from our ears, gloves from our fingertips, teaches us to perceive reality differently.

My twenties were entirely taken up with literature. Entirely.

My dad was a poet. He saw the world through unique glasses, with simplicity, spirituality, and humor.

Oh, he's magic. Faulkner has opened passages in my brain. You do things you'd never expect.

It is popular to believe that in order to see clearly one must believe nothing. This may work well enough if you are observing cells under a microscope. It will not work if you are writing fiction. For the fiction writer, to believe nothing is to see nothing.

This, I thought, is how great visionaries and poets see everything- as if for the first time. Each morning they see a new world before their eyes; they do not really see it, they create it.

Young writers should read books past bedtime and write things down in notebooks when they are supposed to be doing something else.

So much of what I see reminds me of something I read in a book, when shouldn't it be the other way around?

I take literature as a really serious human activity. It's not just a playful thing. It can be hilarious and wonderful and performative, but I think it's really serious.

I made use of the college library by borrowing books other than scientific books, such as all of the plays by George Bernard Shaw, the writing of Edgar Allan Poe. The college library helped me to develop a broader aspect on life.

I began reading everyhing in the family library. Kidnapped, Treasure Island, Robinson Crusoe. And of course, if you're running out of books to read you can always read Shakespeare.

Books are the windows through which the soul looks out.