Linda Grant Quotes

I always loved reading. Growing up, my favorite book was 'A Child's Garden of Verses,' by Robert Louis Stevenson.

At the age of 12 I won the school prize for Best English Essay. The prize was a copy of Somerset Maugham's 'Introduction To Modern English And American Literature.' To this day I keep it on the shelf between my collection of Forester's works and the little urn that contains my mother's ashes.

Buying books would be a good thing if one could also buy the time to read them in: but as a rule the purchase of books is mistaken for the appropriation of their contents.

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.

Some writers you return to again and again, and for me, Nancy Mitford is one of them.

And what would happen if we never read the classics? There comes a point in life, it seems to me, where you have to decide whether you're a Person of Letters or merely someone who loves books, and I'm beginning to see that the book lovers have more fun.

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.

I remember daydreaming out in the outfield: I wish I had more time. I want to read 'The Brothers Karamazov.'

I remember when I was reading 'The Bear,' I was reading as a kid. All these years later, one returns to that for an entirely different reason.

I used to just sit down and read the dictionary, and I read the Bible and Shakespeare from cover to cover.

The old fiction room at my high school was a small box of wonders, and no matter how long I spent investigating its seven and a half overstuffed shelves, I never stopped discovering treasures.

We can spend Rs 5,000 for a meal at the Taj and thousands on all kinds of shopping, but we're always stingy about books. We always think of borrowing. Why? Writers can use some support. If you have space and money, you should buy your own books.

I love to reread, even more than I like to read, so keeping a hold of books that I adore is very important, although they flee from me - they are always fleeing.

I quite liked Dostoyevsky when I was younger.

I fall for all those lists of 100 books you must read, and go out and buy most of them.

A Boosh fan bought me an original copy of 'The Jungle Book' - like, the first print from 1894 - so I've just started re-reading that and am really enjoying it. But the last book I read in its entirety was 'Willard and his Bowling Trophies,' by Richard Brautigan, which is amazing.

A library represents the mind of its collector, fancies and foibles, strengths and weaknesses, prejudices and preferences.

If it's a good book, anyone will read it. I'm totally unashamed about still reading things I loved in my childhood.

All reading is good reading. And all reading of Jane Austen and Charles Dickens is sublime reading.

Reading well is one of the greatest pleasures that solitude can afford you.

What defines someone's music taste is their teens and early 20s. It's that combination of your sexual awakening and the music of the time, it fixes you forever.

I'm not a fast reader. I like to linger over each sentence, enjoying the style. If I don't enjoy the writing, I stop.

A sure sign of a good book is that you like it more the older you get.

The apartment was entirely, was only, for her: a wall of books, both read and unread, all of them dear to her not only in themselves, their tender spines, but in the moments or periods they evoked… Her self, then, was represented in her books; her times in her records; and the rest of the room she thought of as a pure, blank slate.