Daniel Pennac Quotes

reading is a private act, private even from the person who wrote the book. Once the novel is out there, the author is beside the point. The reader and the book have their own relationship now, and should be left alone to work things out for themselves.

And the process of reading is such a private one. I once came into a room where a friend of mine was reading one of my books, and he clicked his tongue impatiently and shooed me off.

You see, the interesting thing about books, as opposed, say, to films, is that it's always just one person encountering the book, it's not an audience, it's one to one.

With a book, there's no volume to turn up. You're very naked with a book.

In the moment of reading, the writer comes up to the surface and the reader comes up to the surface and they kiss, like two fish. That actually does happen.

Every book is an image of solitude. It is a tangible object that one can pick up, put down, open, and close, and its words represent many months if not many years, of one man’s solitude, so that with each word one reads in a book one might say to himself that he is confronting a particle of that solitude

A book is a heart that only beats in the chest of another.

There's nothing wrong with reading a book you love over and over. When you do, the words get inside you, become a part of you, in a way that words in a book you've read only once can't.

The logic: Reading is a private pursuit, one that often takes place behind closed doors. A young lady might retreat with a book, might even take it into her boudoir, and there, reclining on here silken sheets, imbibing the thrills and chills manufactured by writerly quills, one of her hands, one not absolutely needed to grip the little volume, might wander. The fear, in short, as one-handed reading. [p. 146]

My writing is of a very different kind from anything I've heard about. All this mythological material is out there, a big gathering of stuff, and I have been reading it for some forty- or fifty-odd years. There are various ways of handling that. The most common is to put the material together and publish a scholarly book about it. But when I'm writing, I try to get a sense of an experiential relationship to the material. In fact, I can't write unless that happens ... I don't write unless the stuff is really working on me, and my selection of material depends on what works.

Books are a poor substitute for female companionship, but they are easier to find.

I am sure everyone has had the experience of reading a book and finding it vibrating with aliveness, with colour and immediacy. And then, perhaps some weeks later, reading it again and finding it flat and empty. Well, the book hasn't changed: you have.

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.

One of the things that I love when I go to a film or when I'm reading some book or whatever, is to be told a secret I thought only I knew and then someone says, "Oh my gosh, you know, too." And film can take us into private moments in a way that the theater, I think, kind of can't, and that's one of the reasons I like doing films. And the way a book can is that these little secrets and the private things that go on in our minds that maybe we haven't shared with anyone, and then someone writes it or shows it to you in a film, you think, "Oh, that's me. Oh my God, that's me, I have that secret."

I'd go somewhere where no one spoke. I would take a stack of books up to my hips, and I'd read nonstop. And I'd be reading naked.

Whether it is fun to go to bed with a good book depends a great deal on who's reading it.

You have to seduce the reader, manipulate their mind and heart, listen to the music of language. I sometimes think of prose as music, in terms of its rhythms and dynamics, the way you compress and expand the attention of a reader over a sentence, the way the tempo pushes you towards an image or sensation. We want an intense experience, so that we can forget ourselves when we enter the world of the book. When you are reading, the physical object of the book should disappear from your hands.

Reading is an escape, an education, a delving into the brain of another human being on such an intimate level that every nuance of thought, every snapping of synapse, every slippery desire of the author is laid open before you like, well, a book.

the art of reading hardly differs from the art of writing, in that its most intense pleasures and pains must remains private, and cannot be communicated to others.

I love the apparent quiet of reading a book. You sit there; you're not really moving. It looks very solitary. It looks very boring, but actually it's the most exciting place because it's going on for you, and you're in that relationship. In that sense, it's like being with a lover. Nobody else can intrude on that space. It's the two of you. It's your own world.

No matter how enormous a novel may become, the physical act of reading determines that there's no way it can become a communal experience. To read is intimate. It's almost masturbatory.

Love's mysteries in souls do grow, But yet the body is his book.

For where all love is, the speaking is unnecessary

Someone gave me the Love Languages book, and that has been the best book I've ever read about relationships and has helped me the most.

I declare after all there is no enjoyment like reading! How much sooner one tires of any thing than of a book! -- When I have a house of my own, I shall be miserable if I have not an excellent library.