Joanna Scott Quotes

Confusing the author and the character seems to be a popular and rather unsophisticated reaction to books.

Some books are to be tasted, others to be swallowed, and some few to be chewed and digested.

I read part of it all the way through.

When I read, I'm purely a reader.

For example, Americans seem reluctant to take on Shakespeare because you don't think you're very good at it - which is rubbish. You're missing out here.

Writers themselves benefit from all helpful information about their task and methods. Readers, in turn, can have both their understanding and appreciation of literature enhanced by information about the writer's work.

As society diversifies, the number of people who read literature is decreasing. It will be difficult for readers to digest my ideas through literature.

Those who do not read criticism will rarely merit to be criticised.

You become a reader by reading the literature, not by reading the handbooks about it.

Poetry always runs away from you - it's very difficult to grasp it, and every time you read it, depending on your conditions, you will have a different grasp of it. Whereas with a novel, once you have read it, you have grasped it.

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.

I hate reading reviews.

I had read Harold Bloom's 'Where Shall Wisdom Be Found?' Late in his life, having read everything, Bloom asked which books had given him wisdom. I had just read a bunch of contemporary novels that had no wisdom for me.

I'm not sure at all that literature should be studied on the university level. ... Why should people study books? Isn't it rather silly to study Pride and Prejudice. Either you get it or you don't.

I guess the important thing for young writers is to read.

You should approach Joyce's Ulysses as the illiterate Baptist preacher approaches the Old Testament: with faith.

It is no more expected of most producers to read a book than it is, say, of Ted Williams to dust off home plate.

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

The hours I spent attempting to decipher some of Dunnett's more oblique passages opened me to the possibilities of romantic storytelling.

In reading, we are both scientists and poets.

There are books that are made for you to sit and puzzle over and spend time with.

A book exists at the intersection of the author's subconscious and the reader's response.

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.

I'm dyslexic. If you can reconcile yourself to not being able to burn through books, which you shouldn't any way, you can slow the whole process down. Then, because of my disability, there is more for me in imaginative literature than there is for other people.

A reader who quarrels with postulates, who dislikes Hamlet because he does not believe that there are ghosts or that people speak in pentameters, clearly has no business in literature. He cannot distinguish fiction from fact, and belongs in the same category as the people who send checks to radio stations for the relief of suffering heroines in soap operas.