top of page
.png){kind=small}
"I find it's impossible for me to read Proust."
Standard
Customized
Exlpore more Reading quotes
"Just as one spoils the stomach by overfeeding and thereby impairs the whole body, so can one overload and choke the mind by giving it too much nourishment. For the more one reads the fewer are the traces left of what one has read; the mind is like a tablet that has been written over and over. Hence it is impossible to reflect; and it is only by reflection that one can assimilate what one has read. If one reads straight ahead without pondering over it later, what has been read does not take root, but is for the most part lost."
"Those who are incapable of committing great crimes do not readily suspect them in others."
"Back at the Chateau Windsor there was a rat-like scratching at the door of my room. Vinod, the youngest servant, came in with a soda water. He placed it next to the bag of toffees. Then he watched me read. I was used to being observed reading. Sometimes the room would fill like a railway station at rush hour and I would be expected to cure widespread boredom."
"Someday I must read this scholar Everyone. He seems to have written so much--all of it wrong."
"The true reader reads every work seriously in the sense that he reads it whole-heartedly, makes himself as receptive as he can. But for that very reason he cannot possibly read every work solemly or gravely. For he will read 'in the same spirit that the author writ.'... He will never commit the error of trying to munch whipped cream as if it were venison."
"Reading for enjoyment won't die altogether, but this Ereader device has the potential to repel those less imaginative from fiction. And that could have an undesirable domino effect."
"She'd obviously read the book many times before, and so she read flawlessly and confidently, and I could hear her smile in the reading of it, and the sound of that smile made me think that maybe I would like novels better if Alaska Young read them to me."
Explore more quotes by Norman MacCaig
"But you'd have a job to find many of my poems which would seem to be very influenced by a particular person."
"But I hang on to books. I love them. I even think they're very nice decor in a room - far better than paintings... That's not quite true!"
"When I was asked to be Writer in Residence at Edinburgh I thought, you can't teach poetry. This is ridiculous."
"There are some friends you don't meet for twenty years and when you meet them again it's as if no twenty years has happened - you're lucky when that happens. I feel the same about books."
"All I write about is what's happened to me and to people I know, and the better I know them, the more likely they are to be written about."
bottom of page