Literary Enjoyment Quotes

I'm a slow reader, but I usually get through seventy or eighty books a year, most fiction. I don't read in order to study the craft; I read because I like to read

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

Mr. Gladstone read Homer for fun, which I thought served him right.

I'm reading 'Ten Storey Love Song' by Richard Milward. I read his first novel, 'Apples,' after hearing a reading of his in the Hague. I really enjoyed it, so I've started this one.

The books I read I do enjoy, very much; otherwise I wouldn't read them. Most of them are for review, for the New York Review of Books, and substantial.

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

Charles Dickens is a lot of fun to read but it's not obscure, and that's just fine.

He liked the mere act of reading, the magic of turning scratches on a page into words inside his head.

There are two motives for reading a book; one, that you enjoy it; the other, that you can boast about it.

It is the misfortune of poetry, to be seldom safely enjoyed by those who enjoy it completely.

What I like best is a book that's at least funny once in a while. What really knocks me out is a book that, when you're all done reading it, you wish the author that wrote it was a terrific friend of yours and you could call him up on the phone whenever you felt like it. That doesn't happen much, though.

The sincere love of books has nothing to do with cleverness or stupidity any more than any other sincere love. It is a quality of character, a freshness, a power of pleasure, a power of faith. A silly person may delight in reading masterpieces just as a silly person may delight in picking flowers. A fool may be in love with a poet as he may be in love with a woman.

It's not a terribly original thing to say, but I love Raymond Carver. For one thing, he's fun to read out loud.

I mean, when you're tired of book reviews, you're tired of life.

but for my own part, if a book is well written, I always find it too short.

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

When I read, I'm purely a reader.

Literature is the most agreeable way of ignoring life.

We ought to regard books as we do sweetmeats, not wholly to aim at the pleasantest, but chiefly to respect the wholesomest; not forbidding either, but approving the latter most.

There are books full of great writing that don't have very good stories. Read sometimes for the story... don't be like the book-snobs who won't do that. Read sometimes for the words--the language. Don't be like the play-it-safers who won't do that. But when you find a book that has both a good story and good words, treasure that book.

Literature bores me, especially great literature

And indeed, what is better than to sit by one's fireside in the evening with a book, while the wind beats against the window and the lamp is buring?

Far be it from me, my dear sister, to depreciate such pleasures. They would doubtless be congenial with the generality of female minds. But I confess they would have no charms for me. I should infinitely prefer a book.

At night, when the curtains are drawn and the fire flickers, my books attain a collective dignity.