Hilton Als Quotes

Making things difficult for the reader is less an attack on the reader than it is on the age and its facile knowledge-market.

I enjoy a challenge or provocation, something to think about, to talk about after it's done.

No efforts of mine could avail to make the book easy reading.

[On Gertrude Stein's Making of Americans:] I doubt if all the people who should read it will read it for a great while yet, for it is in such a limited edition, and reading it is anyhow a sort of permanent occupation.

And it's impossible for me to read Henry James.

I like to make people think a little bit.

I only got 'War and Peace' on the third attempt.

Paradise Lost is a book that, once put down, is very hard to pick up again.

Words ought to be a little wild, for they are the assaults of thoughts on the unthinking.

If I couldn't use food or love to define contentment, I would use reading.

In my books you have to concentrate, but I work hard to make it that, when you do, the rewards are quite high.

Every year, I come to TED prepared to roll my eyes a lot at the beginning, but knowing that at some point in the intellectual marathon, my brain will buckle to the cascade of ideas and bend to the painstakingly rehearsed presentations.

Read books and keep informed. The conversation can get old if you don't have some good new topics to bring to the table.

Books - the best antidote against the marsh-gas of boredom and vacuity

Good drama should sandpaper the mind.

It's not easy having a good marriage--but I don't want easy. Easy doesn't make you grow. Easy doesn't make you think. I thank God everyday that I am married to a man who makes me think. That's my definition of true love.

It's a rare book that wins the battle against drooping eyelids.

But reading is different, reading is something you do. With TV, and cinema for that matter, everything's handed to you on a plate, nothing has to be worked at, they just spoon-feed you. The picture, the sound, the scenery, the atmospheric music in case you haven't understood what the director's on about... The creaking door that tells you to be stiff. You have to imagine it all when you're reading.

A person who does not read cannot think. He may have good mental processes, but he has nothing to think about. You can feel for people or natural phenomena and react to them, but they are not ideas. You cannot think about them.

While reading writers of great formulatory power — Henry James, Santayana, Proust — I find I can scarcely get through a page without having to stop to record some lapidary sentence. Reading Henry James, for example, I have muttered to myself, "C’mon, Henry, turn down the brilliance a notch, so I can get some reading done." I may be one of a very small number of people who have developed writer’s cramp while reading.

You're always trying to look for material that is as challenging as possible, so that's why I like stuff where the characters go through the most difficult times they've ever had in their life. It makes me push myself further and learn more about myself.

Of all the diversions of life, there is none so proper to fill up its empty spaces as the reading of useful and entertaining authors.

He is the happiest man who is engaged in a business which tasks the most faculties of his mind.

Reading is everything. Reading makes me feel like I've accomplished something, learned something, become a better person. Reading makes me smarter. Reading gives me something to talk about later on. Reading is the unbelievably healthy way my attention deficit disorder medicates itself. Reading is escape, and the opposite of escape; it's a way to make contact with reality after a day of making things up, and it's a way of making contact with someone else's imagination after a day that's all too real. Reading is grist. Reading is bliss.

Easy writing's curst hard reading.