Textual Engagement Quotes

When the modern scholar cites from a classic text, the quotation seems to burn a hole in his own drab page.

The better the book the more room for the reader.

...what I enjoy in a narrative is not directly its content or even its structure, but rather the abrasions I impose upon the fine surface: I read on, I skip, I look up, I dip in again. Which has nothing to do with the deep laceration the text of bliss inflicts upon language itself, and not upon the simple temporality of its reading.

The writer after all is only half the book, the other half is the reader.

It is my contention that the process of reading is part of the process of writing, the necessary completion without which writing can hardly be said to exist.

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.

We are now in want of an art to teach how books are to be read rather than to read them. Such an art is practicable.

I hope I'm wrong, but I think the victory of the screen is going to win out. It raises the fundamental question: is the quality of reading and comprehension as good when you read it on a screen as when you read it on a physical paper?

If you don’t like to read, you haven’t found the right book.

In reading some books we occupy ourselves chiefly with the thoughts of the author; in perusing others, exclusively with our own.

We must begin to understand the nature of intertextuality . . . the manner by which texts poems and novels respond to other texts. After all, all cats may be black at night, but not to other cats.