Angela Carter Quotes

Read anything I write for the pleasure of reading it. Whatever else you find will be the measure of what you brought to the reading.

What is reading but silent conversation?

No one ever reads a book. He reads himself through books.

To read as if your life depended on it would mean to let into your reading your beliefs, the swirl of your dreamlife, the physical sensations of your ordinary carnal life; and simultaneously, to allow what you're reading to pierce routines, safe and impermeable, in which ordinary carnal life is tracked, charted, channeled. Then, what of the right answers, the so-called multiple-choice examination sheet with the number 2 pencil to mark one choice and one choice only?

Readers themselves, I think, contribute to a book. They add their own imaginations, and it is as though the writer only gave them something to work on, and they did the rest.

The experience of reading a book is always unique. I believe that you render a version of the story, when you read a book, in a way that is unique and special to each person who reads it.

Reading a book is like re-writing it for yourself. You bring to a novel, anything you read, all your experience of the world. You bring your history and you read it in your own terms.

The reading eye must do the work to make them live, and so it did, again and again, never the same life twice, as the artist had intended.

When I read a book, I put in all the imagination I can, so that it is almost like writing the book as well as reading it - or rather, it is like living it. It makes reading so much more exciting, but I don't suppose many people try to do it.

It is my contention that the process of reading is part of the process of writing, the necessary completion without which writing can hardly be said to exist.

Readers re-create any story to suit their own needs. They re-clothe the story in their own shirts. Put simply: just as we write the story we need to write, they read the story they need to read.

…she was discovering once again that reading and writing were not the same — you couldn't just soak it up then squeeze it out again.

You can't expect that, after a poor fellow has written a book, he should also understand it.

Tis the good reader that makes the good book; a good head cannot read amiss: in every book he finds passages which seem confidences or asides hidden from all else and unmistakeably meant for his ear.

Poor reading, like poor writing, is imposing what you already know on texts. You should go into reading to discover, not to reaffirm what you know.

The greatest part of a writer's time is spent in reading in order to write. A man will turn over half a library to make a book.

A great poem leaves so much room for everybody to have such a different reaction to it.

Writing and reading fiction is, I think, a human effort to make sense of the world.

With most of the songs and music that I've composed, irrespective of the myriad videos made, I was always careful not to overly define the experience, leaving room for people to internalize things for themselves, making their experience more integral.

What is reading, but silent conversation.

Reading, like writing, is a creative act. If readers only bring a narrow range of themselves to the book, then they'll only see their narrow range reflected in it.

Each reader projects their own version of the experience inside their skull as they go along. It's probably true that no two people read exactly the same book.

We buy a copy of 'Gravity's Rainbow,' say, and we carry our copy home. We open it; we fall into it. And it is here that the word 'copy' fails. Because what I experience when I read 'Gravity's Rainbow,' or 'Beloved,' or 'The Moviegoer,' is not at all a 'copy' of what you experience when you read the same novel.

In reading, we are both scientists and poets.

Not every book has to be loaded with symbolism, irony, or musical language, but it seems to me that every book-at least every one worth reading-is about something.