David Ferry Quotes

Iwas not a reader at all, not until I discovered 'The Hobbit.' That changed my life. It gave me the courage to read. It led me to the 'Lord of the Rings' series. And once I'd read that, I knew I could read anything because I had just read thousands of pages.

What is wonderful about great literature is that it transforms the man who reads it towards the condition of the man who wrote.

I can't pick out one single book that had such a profound personal impact.

When you read a great book, you don't escape from life, you plunge deeper into it.

A great novel is a kind of conversion experience. We come away from it changed.

'Anna Karenina.' I read it in college. I was so engrossed that I couldn't stop reading it and neglected all my other studies. I would go to the library even on nice warm weekends and just lock myself up. I think that was the first time that I felt transformed by a book.

I mark the reading of 'Look Homeward, Angel' as one of the pivotal events of my life. It starts off with the single greatest, knock-your-socks-off first page I have ever come across in my careful reading of world literature.

The ways in which a book, once read, stays (and changes) in the reader's mind are unpredictable.

I think I had a particular moment when I was 15 years old. I read 'Crime and Punishment,' and that book just, I think, more than any other book made me want to be a writer, 'cause it was the first time that I hadn't just entered a book, but a book had entered me.

It's possible of course, especially when you're young, to read a book and take it to your heart. And you don't need to speak to anybody about it - it's so important to you: You have found it.

My sense of what a book should be has changed so radically. I like to think for the better.

The truly great books are always novels: 'Anna Karenina,' 'The Brothers Karamazov,' 'The Magic Mountain.' Just as with 'Shahnameh,' I browse these books from time to time to remember how a great book works on us or to teach my students at Columbia University.

I know many books which have bored their readers, but I know of none which has done real evil.

If your reading habits are anything like mine, then you can remember the exact moment that certain books came into your life. You remember where you were standing and whom you were with. You remember the feel of the book in your hands and the cover, that exact cover, even if the art has changed over the years.

When I was growing up, a lot of books affected me, but I never wrote letters to the author or anything like that. I'm always mindful that there are probably a whole bunch of people reading my books like that, too.

To read is to have experiences; every book changes my life at least a little bit. The first time I can remember this happening was when I was 10, with a biography of Thomas Edison.

A great book should leave you with many experiences.

I firmly believe there are books whose greatness actually enable you to live.

Good books leave an impression. Great books forever alter the way you think about what it means to be alive. You Disappear is not just a well-told story, but a dramatic recalibrating of what it means to have a mind-and a soul.

Reading a great book causes jolts and frights.

Reading yields a wish to write, I think, except if the reading is dull and uninspiring.

I have the feeling that I know who I am, only I'm not anymore.

Maybe she couldn't know who she was today. Maybe it was enough to know that she was no longer who she was before.

I used to be somebody. Now I’m somebody else.

[Raymond Roussel] said that after his first book he expected that the next morning there would be a kind of aura around his person and that everyone in the street would be able to see that he had written a book. This is the obscure desire harboured by everyone who writes. It is true that the first text one writes is neither written for others, nor because one is what one is: one writes to become other than what one is. One tries to modify one's way of being through the act of writing.