William Styron Quotes

A great book should leave you with many experiences, and slightly exhausted. You should live several lives while reading it.

If the book we are reading does not wake us, as with a fist hammering on our skull, why then do we read it?

A book burrows into your life in a very profound way because the experience of reading is not passive.

A good book ... leaves you wanting to reread the book. A great book compels you to reread your own soul.

At night, here in the library, the ghosts have voices.... The various qualities of my readings seem to permeate my every muscle, so that when I finally decide to turn off the library light, I carry into my sleep the voices and the movements of the book I've just closed.

To me, the point of a novel is to take you to a still place. You can multitask with a lot of things, but you can’t really multitask reading a book.

Reading a great book causes jolts and frights.

A great book should leave you with many experiences.

When you're reading, you're laughing and not quite noticing what's happening. One second you're still kind of chuckling, and then all of sudden you're in the third act of the book and in this very dark and claustrophobic place.

A good book is never exhausted; we are never exhausted by a good book.

What makes a good book? Scholars and critics have been debating that question for decades. I like books that touch my head and my heart at the same time.

In Africa, when you pick up a book worth reading, out of the deadly consignments which good ships are always being made to carry out all the way from Europe, you read it as an author would like his book to be read, praying to God that he may have it in him to go on as beautifully as he has begun. Your mind runs, transported, upon a fresh deep green track.

Few things leave a deeper mark on the reader, than the first book that finds its way to his heart.

Even today, I hunt for the fabulous books that will change me utterly. I find myself happiest in the middle of a book which I forget that I am reading, but am instead immersed in a made-up life lived at the highest pitch.

Spoilers are cowardly. They're just people who want to anesthetize themselves against the tension and the experience that the director and the artist have set up. If you go in there knowing what's going to happen, it's like reading the last page of the book. It's just cowardly.

There never yet have been, nor are there now, too many good books.

When you read a book [The Hunger Games], you create that tonal bandwidth. You set a tone for yourself, as you're reading it, in which everything exists within the world of your imagination. In the book, it's great when she can push a button and food comes up, as per your order.

Good books leave an impression. Great books forever alter the way you think about what it means to be alive. You Disappear is not just a well-told story, but a dramatic recalibrating of what it means to have a mind-and a soul.

I really enjoyed reading the writings of Fredrick Buechner, I havent read anything by him in probably a decade but about 20 years ago I read four or five books of his and it helped me.

I've just surfaced from spending several days in a state of rapture: I was reading a book... I felt alive and engaged and positively brilliant, bursting with ideas, brimming with memories of other books I've loved.

Books are attracted to me. They make a beeline for me, and stick to me. I have been so fond of them that at last they have begun to reciprocate. In my hands books burst like ripe fruit. Like magic flowers they unfold their petals to show me the vital thought, the suggestive word, the confirming quotation, the decisive illustration.

Video games just can't compare with the variety and intensity of reading.

It is not all books that are as dull as their readers.

Afterwards, in bed with a book, the spell of television feels remote compared to the journey into the page. To be in a book. To slip into the crease where two pages meet, to live in the place where your eyes alight upon the words to ignite a world of smoke and peril, colour and serene delight. That is a journey no one can end with the change of a channel. Enduring magic.

I do not read a book; I hold a conversation with the author.