People read books to escape the uncertainties of life.
And you love to read, you love to escape, right?
The detective novel is the art-for-art's-sake of our yawning Philistinism, the classic example of a specialized form of art removed from contact with the life it pretends to build on.
Books bear him up a while, and make him try to swim with bladders of philosophy.
I just want to be told a story, and I want to believe I'm living that story, and I don't give a thought to influences or method or any other writerly concerns.
I read a lot of books. So, usually when I go home I try to re-charge my batteries and absorb new stories to become inspired again.
A book is a device to ignite the imagination.
Books are wonderful, but they aren't that powerful.
Literature was the passport to enter a larger life; that is, the zone of freedom. Literature was freedom. Especially in a time in which the values of reading and inwardness are so strenuously challenged, literature is freedom.
It was a particularly good evening to begin a book.
When I read, I'm purely a reader.
Literature is my Utopia. Here I am not disenfranchised. No barrier of the senses shuts me out from the sweet, gracious discourses of my book friends. They talk to me without embarrassment or awkwardness.
What a blessing it is to love books as I love them;- to be able to converse with the dead, and to live amidst the unreal!
My first and last love will always be fiction. It's the first thing I do in the morning and the last thing I do at night. I love the novel because it's like a love affair. You can just fall into it and keep going, and you never know where it's going to take you.
In the past, I travelled with 'The Hero and the Crown' by Robin McKinley: I suffer from a fear of flying, and I felt a bit safer knowing I carried the book and characters with me.
We have more faith in a well-written romance while we are reading it than in common history. The vividness of the representations in the one case more than counterbalances the mere knowledge of the truth of facts in the other.
Which of us has not felt that the character we are reading in the printed page is more real than the person standing beside us?
Why, after all, should readers never be harrowed? Surely there is enough happiness in life without having to go to books for it.
In my mind what novels do best is that they immerse us deeply into our character's world - they truly transport us deep into these spaces - but the same way you know a Hollywood movie won't end after thirty minutes, you carry in yourself the implicit contract that the novel won't throw you out of itself 'til the very end. That bulk of pages is a form of consolation, of security.
Young writers should read books past bedtime and write things down in notebooks when they are supposed to be doing something else.
I think I was born with the impression that what happened in books was much more reasonable, and interesting, and real, in some ways, than what happened in life.
Books" - Snell smiled - "are a kind of magic.
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.
Literature is a mystical place for me. It's not dry. It's where miracles happen.
Do the children who prefer books set in the real, ordinary, workaday world ever read as obsessively as those who would much rather be transported into other worlds entirely?
