No book can be so good, as to be profitable when negligently read.
To encounter 'Beowulf' is like taking a sledgehammer to a quarry face. You must bang in there.
Sarah Palin's book is big, 400 pages. She wrote the book herself and agonized over every word, and so will you.
All I know is that you can get very little from a book that is making you weep with the effort of reading it. You won’t remember it, and you’ll learn nothing from it, and you’ll be less likely to choose a book over Big Brother next time you have a choice.
Anyone who is too lazy to master the comparatively small glossary necessary to understand Chaucer deserves to be shut out from the reading of good books forever.
For a lot of kids, reading is not magical. It's really hard work.
Really interesting novels, they always are so demanding of you on some level that you don't fall asleep.
The writer I adore is Ivy Compton-Burnett.I couldn't get more than a few pages in when I first read her. In many ways, she is very clumsy and her plots are rubbish. But we don't read her for that. There are pages and pages of dialogue. What it requires is real effort and attention.
One reader is better than another in proportion as he is able of a greater range of activity in reading and exerts more effort.
I have to often read the same sentence over and over before I understand it. And I have to convince myself that what I'm reading is so enjoyable and so exciting and so good for me that it's worth the effort.
A good writer wants from us — or has no right to ask more than — intelligence, good faith and time.
It's a lot of work to read a crummy script.
There is only one situation I can think of in which men and women make an effort to read better than they usually do. It is when they are in love and reading a love letter.
People choose to read, and it takes effort. It's not one of those hobbies that asks nothing of the person who is doing it. It's more than a hobby.
Reading is a huge effort for many people, a bore for others, and, believe it or not, many people prefer watching TV.
A prose that is altogether alive demands something of the reader that the ordinary novel reader is not prepared to give.
Many books require no thought from those who read them, and for a very simple reason; they made no such demand upon those who wrote them.
