D. B. Weiss Quotes

My last vivid boyhood fright from books came when I was 15; I was visiting my uncle and aunt in Greenwich, and, emboldened by my success with 'The Waste Land,' I opened their copy of 'Ulysses.' The whiff of death off those remorseless, closely written pages overpowered me. So: back to soluble mysteries, and jokes that were not cosmic.

When I bought a collection of Tolstoy and Dostoyevsky, I returned home with a bright enthusiasm to begin the long march into the Russian soul. Though I've failed to read either man to completion, they both helped me to imagine that my fictional South Carolina was as vast a literary acreage as their Russia.

Every few years, I think, 'Maybe now I'm finally smart enough or sophisticated enough to understand 'Ulysses.' So I pick it up and try it again. And by page 10, as always, I'm like, 'What the hell?'

Every time I sit down to reread 'War and Peace' - I've read it three times - I feel as though I've lived another life.

'Ulysses' is like a big box of tricks that you can dive into. Each time you read it, you find something new.

Like many readers, I am continually in search of books that allow me to lose myself in an entirely unique universe.

Ulysses could have done with a good editor. You know people are always putting Ulysses in the top 10 books ever written but I doubt that any of those people were really moved by it.

Digital texts are all well and good, but books on shelves are a presence in your life. As such, they become a part of your day-to-day existence, reminding you, chastising you, calling to you. Plus, book collecting is, hands down, the greatest pastime in the world.

Reading makes immigrants of us all. It takes us away from home, but more important, it finds homes for us everywhere.

If you ever want to understand multitasking in prose, James Joyce is your man.

Sometimes, readers, when they're young, are given, say, a book like 'Moby Dick' to read. And it is an interesting, complicated book, but it's not something that somebody who has never read a book before should be given as an example of why you'll really love to read, necessarily.

Those of us who know the transporting wonder of a reading life know that it little matters where we are when we talk about books or meet authors or bemoan the state of publishing because when we read, we are always inside, sheltered in that interior room, that clean, well-lighted, timeless place that is the written word.

A book is kind of like a river; I simply jump in and start swimming.

In my books you have to concentrate, but I work hard to make it that, when you do, the rewards are quite high.

Now that my kids are out of the house, I'm finally able to get to the classics I never read: Emily Bronte, Dylan Thomas, Joseph Heller's 'Catch-22.' It's endless. They're all in this gigantic pile next to my bed.

There are so many books I want to read. Difficult books. That's what I intend to do and what I'm longing for.

A novel ensures that we can look before and after, take action at whatever pace we choose, read again and again, skip and go back. The story in a book is humble and serviceable, available, friendly, is not switched on and off but taken up and put down, lasts a lifetime.

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.

I don't go anywhere without a book by James Joyce called 'Finnegan's Wake.'

To be transported into another world is my very favourite part of reading.

James Joyce actually is rewarding you in all of these incredible ways.

In a book, you can kind of take time and have lulls in places.

If you word-spot James Joyce, you'll miss the entire experience.

I get transported when I read books.

One of the stories that really impressed me was 'Anna Karenina.' As a novel, that made an impression on me, showing me what the novel can do.