George Gissing Quotes

The greatest pleasure of reading consists in re-reading.

I like it when someone gives me a new book of poetry by a poet I haven't read.

Reading is not a duty, and has consequently no business to be made disagreeable.

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

A surprising number of people - including many students of literature - will tell you they haven't really lived in a book since they were children. Sadly, being taught literature often destroys the life of the books.

Finding people who get enormous pleasure from reading books is a more and more unusual experience, and so writers just so much want to be heard.

Force me to choose my best book, and I always come back to 'Gorilla.' It was the first time I felt I understood what picture books could do.

I love reading; I really enjoy it. I read books quite fast, which kind of annoys me, but I like it at the same time because I can read a book in a day.

The Classics are those books which constitute a treasured experience for those who have read and loved them; but they remain just as rich an experience for those who reserve the chance to read them for when they are in the best condition to enjoy them.

I remember vividly what it's like to read as a 10-year-old - that passionate inhabiting of a book.

One of the maddening ironies of writing books is that it leaves so little time for reading others'. My bedside is piled with books, but it's duty reading: books for book research, books for review. The ones I pine for are off on a shelf downstairs.

There are things I read doing research, and there are certain books and writers I just love to read. There are books of Brian Morten's that I love, for instance. There's a wonderful book by an Australian writer named Helen Garner called 'The Children's Bach,' and I just love the way she uses language in it.

To be transported into another world is my very favourite part of reading.

One of the great rewards of a writer's life is that it lets you read all the books you want to without feeling guilty.

In fact, isn't it a joy - there is hardly a greater one - to find a new book, a living book, and to know that it will remain with you while life lasts?

The first time I read an excellent book, it is to me just as if I had gained a new friend. When I read a book over I have perused before, it resembles the meeting with an old one.

If you don’t like to read, you haven’t found the right book.

To feel most beautifully alive means to be reading something beautiful, ready always to apprehend in the flow of language the sudden flash of poetry.

Reading should be a pleasure, not a chore.

I've been an inveterate reader of literary magazines since I was a teenager. There are always discoveries. You're sitting in your easy chair, reading; you realize you've read a story or a group of poems four times, and you know, Yes, I want to go farther with this writer.

The novel is about, for me, sustained and organized looking. I do think that people have a hunger for a sustained engagement, that concentration that the book can offer.

People who read poetry, for example, like the feel, the heft and the smell of a book.

My criteria for what makes a book an official 'favorite,' is based almost entirely on how desperately I don't want the story to end.

I read and enjoy just about anything I can get my hands on.

Choose an author as you choose a friend.