Charles Lamb Quotes

Life is too short for reading inferior books.

All the books I've read, I've read at the right moment.

A man is known by the books he reads.

Don't read a book out of its right time for you.

Buy good books, and read them; the best books are the commonest, and the last editions are always the best, if the editors are not blockheads.

All my good reading, you might say, was done in the toilet. There are passages in Ulysses which can be read only in the toilet - if one wants to extract the full flavor of their content.

There's no such thing as a kid who hates reading. There are kids who love reading, and kids who are reading the wrong books.

Read the book you do honestly feel a wish and curiosity to read.

Readers of novels are a strange folk, upon whose probable or even possible tastes no wise book-maker would ever venture to bet.

You're either reading a book or you're not.

Becoming a writer can kind of spoil your reading because you kind of read on tracks. You're reading as someone who wants to enjoy the book but also, as a writer, noticing the techniques that the writer uses and especially the ones that make you want to turn the page to see what happened.

Readers, censors know, are defined by the books they read.

Until one has some kind of professional relationship with books, one does not discover how bad the majority of them are.

Those of us who are blamed when old for reading childish books were blamed when children for reading books too old for us.

How important my books are or anybody's books are, I don't know. I don't think they are terribly important I think that they make people contented during the period they are reading them and this is worth something is to take care of somebody for a couple of hours.

I doubt if I shall ever have time to read the book again -- there are too many new ones coming out all the time which I want to read. Yet an old book has something for me which no new book can ever have -- for at every reading the memories and atmosphere of other readings come back and I am reading old years as well as an old book.

So this is supposed to be about the how, and when, and why, and what of reading -- about the way that, when reading is going well, one book leads to another and to another, a paper trail of theme and meaning; and how, when it's going badly, when books don't stick or take, when your mood and the mood of the book are fighting like cats, you'd rather do anything but attempt the next paragraph, or reread the last one for the tenth time.

If we encounter a man of rare intellect, we should ask him what books he reads.

The other book that I worry no one reads anymore is James Joyce's Ulysses. It's not easy, but every page is wonderful and repays the effort. I started reading it in high school, but I wasn't really able to grasp it. Then I read it in college. I once spent six weeks in a graduate seminar reading it. It takes that long. That's the problem. No one reads that way anymore. People may spend a week with a book, but not six.

We are too civil to books. For a few golden sentences we will turn over and actually read a volume of four or five hundred pages.

Remember that the book which bores you when you are twenty or thirty will open doors for you when you are forty or fifty - and vise versa. Don’t read a book out of its right time for you.

Clearly one must read every good book at least once every ten years.

We ought to regard books as we do sweetmeats, not wholly to aim at the pleasantest, but chiefly to respect the wholesomest; not forbidding either, but approving the latter most.

Never trust anyone who has not brought a book with them.