Some people read to confirm their own hopelessness. Others read to be rescued from it.
When I was a child, when I was an adolescent, books saved me from despair: that convinced me that culture was the highest of values[...].
I don't think of literary novels as self-help documents, although literature undoubtedly saved my life when I was young, enabling me to disappear into all manner of stories, to recognise feelings that I felt alone in.
A well-chosen book saves you from everything, including yourself.
When I was 13 or 14, I started devouring novels; literature took quite a while to take me over, but it caught up just in time to save me from becoming a mathematician.
I feel like people who become writers are people who have been saved by books.
I was a 'reverence for life' man - 'see life steadily and see it whole' - in my days as a lecturer in English lit. We are, I argued, if not exactly 'saved' by reading, at least partially 'repaired' by it: made the better morally and existentially.
Let us hope that good authors who are bad Christians will find salvation through the books they write.
Many a person has been saved from summer alcoholism, not to mention hypertoxicity, by Dostoyevsky.
This was the time in her life that she fell upon books as the only door out of her cell. They became half her world.
