All Quotes By Tag: Reading

“I learned from the age of two or three that any room in our house, at any time of day, was there to read in, or be read to.”

“Writing does not exist unless there is someone to read it, and each reader will take something different from a novel, from a chapter, from a line.”

“The more a book is like an opium pipe, the more the Chinaman reader is satisfied with it and tends to discuss the quality of the drug rather than its lethargic effects.”

“When writing, there are some scenes that are emotionally overwhelming. They completely overcome the author, and only when they do this can they cause a similar reaction in the reader.Through this, the author gets to experience multiple lives. If a character’s life flashes before their eyes, it flashes before the author’s eyes too, and he or she remembers it as his or her own.With reading, we get to live other lives vicariously, and this is doubly so with writing. It is like a lucid dream, where we guide the outcome. In this, we don’t merely write *about* a character — we momentarily *become* them, and walk as they walk, think as they think, and do as they do. When we return to our own life, we might return a little shaken, likely a little stronger, hopefully a little wiser.What is certain is that we return better, because experiencing the lives of others makes us understand their aims and dreams, their fears and foils, the challenges and difficulties, and joys and triumphs, that they face. It helps us grow and empathise, and see all the little pictures that make up the bigger one we see from the omniscience of the narrator.”

“I will write one book that will change entire humankind if only you have enough guts to read my previous ones.”

“Mr Earbrass was virtually asleep when several lines of verse passed through his mind and left it hopelessly awake. Here was the perfect epigraph for TUH:A horrid ?monster has been [something] delay’dBy your/their indiff’rence in the dank brown shadeBelow the garden…His mind’s eye sees them quoted on the bottom third of a right-hand page in a (possibly) olive-bound book he read at least five years ago. When he does find them, it will be a great nuisance if no clue is given to their authorship.”

“I think the reason why I don’t read so much, is because as I have observed, whole books all boil down to a drop of essence. You can read a book full of ten thousand words and at the end, sum it up in one sentence; I am more for the one sentence. I am more for the essence. It’s like how you need a truckload of roses to extract one drop of rose oil; I don’t want to bother with the truckload of roses because I would rather walk away with the drop of rose oil. So in my mind, I have written two hundred books. Why? Because I have with me two hundred vials with one drop of essence in each!”

“We can learn to pay attention, concentrate, devote ourselves to authors. We can slow down so we can hear the voice of texts, feel the movement of sentences, experience the pleasure of words–and own passages that speak to us. (p. 41)”

“To care about words, to have a stake in what is written, to believe in the power of books – this overwhelms the rest, and beside it one’s life becomes very small.”

“One Lifetime is not enough.”

“The reality of a serious writer is a reality of many voices, some of them belonging to the writer, some of them belonging to the world of readers at large.”

“A good story is a dream shared by the author and the reader. Anything that wakes the reader from the dream is a mortal sin.”

“Accept criticism. If you do not offer your work for criticism and accept that criticism, meaning give it serious thought and attention, then you will never improve.”

“Read a lot. But read as a writer, to see how other writers are doing it. And make your knowledge of literature in English as deep and broad as you can. In workshops, writers are often told to read what is being written now, but if that is all you read, you are limiting yourself. You need to get a good overall sense of English literary history, so you can write out of that knowledge.”

“Since I became a novelist I have discovered that I am biased. Either I think a new novel is worse than mine and I don’t like it, or I suspect it is better than my novels and I don’t like it.”