Will Self Quotes

What I am best at is reading a book and then writing a critical essay.

I read part of it all the way through.

I've summarized dozens of books in my literary career; it's become rather second nature.

The writer studies literature, not the world. He is careful of what he reads, for that is what he will write.

I do tend to be an analyzer. I'm an old English major from way back, so I do have fun tearing apart texts and trying to find the hidden secrets and the subtexts in there.

The answers you get from literature depend on the questions you pose.

The greatest texts, I think, first dazzle, then with careful rereading, they instruct. I have learned from Virginia Woolf more than I even know how to articulate.

Teaching literature is teaching how to read. How to notice things in a text that a speed-reading culture is trained to disregard, overcome, edit out, or explain away; how to read what the language is doing, not guess what the author was thinking; how to take evidence from a page, not seek a reality to substitute for it.

In the past few years I've assigned books to be read before a student attends one of my weeklong seminars. I have been astonished by how few people -- people who supposedly want to write -- read books, and if they read them, how little they examine them.

Literary critics make natural detectives.

We can never know that a piece of writing is bad unless we have begun by trying to read it as if it was very good and ended by discovering that we were paying the author an undeserved compliment.

Reading is an active, imaginative act; it takes work.

I think I learned a lot from reading in general - even from reading badly written books.

The attitude that poetry should not be analyzed is prevalent among many who consider themselves experts on children's literature. But I suspected that kids like to look closely at things and figure out what makes them go.

Rereading, we find a new book.

I do a lot of readings.

I believe that writing is derivative. I think good writing comes from good reading.

I don't think there's anything wrong with someone having to read a poem twice. Or even a book.

We didn't have a television, so I grew up with books. This isn't to suggest I'm an intellectual, but I do read a lot because part of acting is an exploration of literature.

For me, when I read a book, I'm very much about detail.

We're not in love with Literature all the time - especially when you have to teach it every day.

There is an art of reading, as well as an art of thinking, and an art of writing.

Most students of literature can pick apart a metaphor or spot an ethnic stereotype, but not many of them can say things like: 'The poem's sardonic tone is curiously at odds with its plodding syntax.'

I'm not well-read, but when I read, I read well.

The reader really has to step up to the plate and read a short story.