Reading Depth Quotes

I'm not well-read, but when I read, I read well.

Besides, rereading, not reading, is what counts.

It is not how many books thou hast, but how good; careful reading profiteth, while that which is full of variety delighteth.

The very cheapness of literature is making even wise people forget that if a book is worth reading, it is worth buying. No book is worth anything which is not worth much; nor is it serviceable, until it has been read, and re-read, and loved, and loved again; and marked, so that you can refer to the passages you want in it.

Read much, but not many works.

Some books are to be tasted, others to be swallowed, and some few to be chewed and digested.

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

We do not enjoy a story fully at the first reading. Not till the curiosity, the sheer narrative lust, has been given its sop and laid asleep, are we at leisure to savour the real beauties.

What I really mean is that a great book should leave you with many experiences, and slightly exhausted at the end. You live several lives while reading it.

If you read a novel in more than two weeks, you don't read the novel really.

Isn't it odd how much fatter a book gets when you've read it several times?

Literature is the art of writing something that will be read twice; journalism what will be grasped at once.

He who reads a story only once is condemned to read the same story his whole life.

In reading, you sense the divine: the things that are larger and greater and more mysterious than yourself.

A great book should leave you with many experiences, and slightly exhausted. You should live several lives while reading it.

When a novel has 200,000 words, then it is possible for the reader to experience 200,000 delights, and to turn back to the first page of the book and experience them all over again, perhaps more intensely.

Reading is a majority skill but a minority art. Yet nothing can replace the exact, complicated, subtle communion between absent author and entranced, present reader.

There's been an unquestionable decline in American culture. The education system is thin on the ground. People don't read as deeply and at length as they used to. And the media has been scattered into so many cable channels.

One reader is better than another in proportion as he is able of a greater range of activity in reading and exerts more effort.

Curiously enough, one cannot read a book; one can only reread it. A good reader, a major reader, and active and creative reader is a rereader.

Throughout my career I've struggled to encourage people to read my books on a more metaphorical level. I'm less attached to my settings than, for example, Saul Bellow. The setting of a novel for me is just a part of the technique. I choose it at the end.

There are books that are made for you to sit and puzzle over and spend time with.

To be well informed, one must read quickly a great number of merely instructive books. To be cultivated, one must read slowly and with a lingering appreciation the comparatively few books that have been written by men who lived, thought, and felt with style.

When someone says to me, 'I love your book - I read it in a day,' I want to tell them to go back and read it again.

My favorite reader is one that revisits books and gets something new out of them each time.