Haruki Murakami Quotes

While it can be pleasurable to move speedily through a work of fiction, there's a different sort of pleasure to be had in lingering, backtracking, rereading the same page.

If you read a novel in more than two weeks, you don't read the novel really.

Reading should be a repeat performance.

I bought a book of Mark Twain quotes. That's about my speed. I'll read a couple quotes and put it down.

You're more likely to finish a book you enjoy, than one that feels like literary drudgery.

The greatest pleasure of reading consists in re-reading.

If one cannot enjoy reading a book over and over again, there is no use in reading it at all.

Once you create this thing between duty and reading, it's over. Reading's over.

To be well informed, one must read quickly a great number of merely instructive books. To be cultivated, one must read slowly and with a lingering appreciation the comparatively few books that have been written by men who lived, thought, and felt with style.

I have the wonderful pleasure of finishing the book and closing it. And I don't read them later.

The writing of Kathleen McGookey shines more brightly than most fine things we feel pleasure to read. Celebrate it!

The mere brute pleasure of reading - the sort of pleasure a cow must have in grazing.

I'm not very much of a reader really, because I find much of it very bad, very uninteresting, very speculative.

I read in a weird way. It comes in waves, and then I start, like, five different books at once. It takes me six months to a year to finish them all, since I read mostly on planes.

You hear all this whining going on, 'Where are our great writers?' The thing I might feel doleful about is: Where are the readers?

Reading is not a duty, and has consequently no business to be made disagreeable.

I want my readers to feel, to think, sometimes to laugh. But most of all I want them to enjoy a good read.

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.

Real men read my books.

I'd somehow always thought of the classics of literature as something apart from me, something to do with academic life and not something you enjoyed.

Most scholarly books we read for the information or insight they contain. But some we return to simply for the pleasure of the author's company.

I do think digital media encourages speed-reading, which can be fine if one is simply seeking information. But a serious novel or work of history or volume of poetry is an experience one should savor, take time over.

When I was younger, I suppose I was interested in checking out as much about writing as I could: bad, weird, irritating, even things not-to-my-taste. Now I am less open. I will decide after a few pages if I want to stay in the world of the book, and if I don't, I put it down. I have less time left.

There are people out there who genuinely love literature, who genuinely love to read and read widely, who will never like, or even necessarily get, my books. That was a hard one to swallow, to not feel slighted by.

Good writing is good writing, and I'm so happy when I read it.