Private Reading Quotes

We keep quiet about what we read. Our enjoyment of a book remains a jealously guarded secret. Perhaps because there's no need to talk, or because it takes time to distill what we've read before we can say anything. Silence is our guarantee of intimacy. We might have finished reading but we're still living the book.

Begin each day with private reading of the Word and prayer.

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.

Reading is a private pursuit; one that takes place behind closed doors.

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]

A writer, or at least a poet, is always being asked by people who should know better: “Whom do you write for?” The question is, of course, a silly one, but I can give it a silly answer. Occasionally I come across a book which I feel has been written especially for me and for me only. Like a jealous lover I don’t want anybody else to hear of it. To have a million such readers, unaware of each other’s existence, to be read with passion and never talked about, is the daydream, surely, of every author.

I believe we have an obligation to read for pleasure, in private and in public places. If we read for pleasure, if others see us reading, then we learn, we exercise our imaginations. We show others that reading is a good thing.

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.

When I was younger I used to lock myself in the bathroom and read in the dry tub. I was also a fan of the 'shoe closet.' Reading felt thrilling and illicit and deeply private to me, and I felt vulnerable doing it in public.

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.

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.

A novel is not a play. A novel takes one reader at a time into its confidence. It can be shockingly personal. Private, even.

Many things embarrass me, but reading isn't one of them. I'm not ashamed of my slightly weird collection of prison memoirs. Nor the flaky meditation books. After all, I can pretend I never read those.

I think the novel is the American form because people read it in private, and the only valuable things that happen in America happen in private life, because public life is a dead loss.

We read privately, mentally listening to the author's voice and translating the writer's thoughts. The book remains static and fixed; the reader journeys through it.

I read books I hate all the time, and I don't mention them or talk about them.

All my good reading, you might say, was done in the toilet.

When people are reading a book, it's a personal thing. They're reading it; it's in their own mind; it's in their own personal space when they're reading it.

We will always return to the private and inviolable act of reading as our culture's way of developing an individual.

Reading is so private, and it is often a reader's habit to finish a book, close the covers, and plunge into the next one without a backward glance.

God, how I still love private readers. It’s what we all used to be.

A man, to read, must read alone. He may make extracts, he may work at books in company; but to read, to absorb, he must be solitary.

Like most writers, I read constantly. I used to hide in remote parts of the yard and house so I could read in peace.

The meeting of writer and reader is an intimate act, and it properly takes place in private.

Poetry is a vocal art for me - but not necessarily a performative one. It might be reading to oneself or recalling some lines by memory.