Reading a great book causes jolts and frights.
A great novel is a kind of conversion experience. We come away from it changed.
If I read a scary story in the newspaper, I find I'm haunted by it.
Novels so often provide an anodyne and not an antidote, glide one into torpid slumbers instead of rousing one with a burning brand.
To read is to have experiences; every book changes my life at least a little bit. The first time I can remember this happening was when I was 10, with a biography of Thomas Edison.
When you read a great book, you don't escape from life, you plunge deeper into it.
When we're done with it, we may find—if it's a good novel—that we're a bit different from what we were before we read it, that we have been changed a little, as if by having meet a new face, crossed a street we've never crossed before.
I think books make you think in a different way than movies and documentaries.
Everybody thought that screen time was bad for vision. Well, it happens that spending a lot of time reading on a computer is bad for your vision, but spending a lot of time playing first-person-shooter games is good for your vision.
What occurs to people when they read Kurt [Vonnegut] is that things are much more up for grabs than they thought they were. The world is a slightly different place just because they read a damn book. Imagine that.
If we weigh the significance of a book by the effect it has on its readers, then the great children's books suddenly turn up very high on the list.
Literature is about telling stories. Now, the gift of literature is that, in some lucky cases, reading a novel or a story makes the reader more curious, more open-minded. It may open a third eye in the middle of the reader's forehead.
I think you’re never the same person when you close a book as when you open one; it changes your life very subtly.
Reading yields a wish to write, I think, except if the reading is dull and uninspiring.
Reading is the scourge of childhood because, in a sense, it creates adulthood.
..you do not leave a library; if you do what it wants you to do, you are taking it with you.
To me, something that's beautiful in terms of a book is something that lives inside the reader both as a discrete and complete thing, but also something that seeps out into their life and thoughts.
No murder or sin or act of barbarism or cruelty has ever been committed by a person fully absorbed in the reading of a book. By this fact alone, we can conclude that readers are nicer people, at least until they put the book down. When we are reading, we are better.
Now, one cannot read nonsense with impunity.
For a child, reading a book can be such an intense experience.
I think for anybody reading the book they're going to get an idea in their heads of all those characters, and I think that once that gets fixed, it's quite hard to shake.
The ways in which a book, once read, stays (and changes) in the reader's mind are unpredictable.
When a reader finishes a wonderful story and lays it aside, he should have to pause for a minute and collect himself.
There's nothing like reading about a world that feels dead to throw your own beautiful, colorful life into sharp relief.
Your soul either feels lifted by something that you read, or it feels squashed by it.
