It is much simpler to buy books than to read them and easier to read them than to absorb their contents.
If a spectator with a philosophical mind, somebody accustomed to reading books, gets the same kind of information in a movie, he might not fully understand it.
We learn what poetry is - if we ever learn - by reading it.
It is no more expected of most producers to read a book than it is, say, of Ted Williams to dust off home plate.
Some books are to be tasted, others to be swallowed, and some few to be chewed and digested.
A novel makes it possible to understand not just events, but the people who control the events; not only their choices, but also their motives.
The most essential and fundamental aspect of culture is the study of literature, since this is an education in how to picture and understand human situations.
We agreed that people are now afraid of the English language. He [T.S. Eliot] said it came of being bookish, but not reading books enough. One should read all styles thoroughly.
We read fine things but never feel them to the full until we have gone the same steps as the author.
I have no very sophisticated understanding of literary forms. Short stories are shorter than novels, and poems are typically shorter than either, though not always.
As a writer, I'm not convinced that we are the best equipped to understand how we go about the business of literary production.
The charge frequently leveled against poetry - that it is difficult, obscure, hermetic and whatnot - indicates not the state of poetry but, frankly, the rung of the evolutionary ladder on which society is stuck.
Isn't it odd how much fatter a book gets when you've read it several times?
I'm not sure that when I read 'Treasure Island' for the first time, when I was about 10, I understood all the words or what was going on. But that didn't stop me reading it, and I certainly didn't forget it.
a good reader makes a good book
I could get a better education interviewing John Steinbeck than talking to an English professor about novels.
Before college, I hadn't voluntarily read anything that might be called literature; I didn't think I'd understand it; I never seemed to understand my English teacher's interpretations of what we read.
It is quite possible--overwhelmingly probable, one might guess--that we will always learn more about human life and personality from novels than from scientific psychology
Literature is less involved in giving you answers and more dedicated to giving you insight.
Like all those possessing a library, Aurelian was aware that he was guilty of not knowing his in its entirety.
As society diversifies, the number of people who read literature is decreasing. It will be difficult for readers to digest my ideas through literature.
Compose aloud: poetry is a sound. Never explain- your reader is as smart as you. Your reader is not just any reader, but is the rare one with ears in his head.
By the year 2070 we cannot say, or it would be imbecile to do so, that any man alive could understand Shakespearean experience better than Shakespeare, whereas any decent eighteen-year-old student of physics will know more physics than Newton.
The reader really has to step up to the plate and read a short story.
Literature, it seems to me, is wisdom.
