"There is nothing more distressing or tiresome than a writer standing in front of an audience and reading his work."

Reading, Work, Nothing, Writer

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"There is nothing more distressing or tiresome than a writer standing in front of an audience and reading his work."

Exlpore more Reading quotes

"What a vast fertility of pleasure books hold for me! I went in and found the table laden with books. I looked in and sniffed them all. I could not resist carrying this one off and broaching it. I think I could happily live here and read forever."

Virginia Woolf, British Author

Reading, Joy, Books, Passion

"Some people claim that it is okay to read trashy novels because sometimes you can find something valuable in them. You can also find a crust of bread in a garbage can, if you search long enough, but there is a better way."

Jim Rohn, American Businessman

Reading, Books, Choice, Values

"If one reads enough books one has a fighting chance. Or better, one's chances of survival increase with each book one reads."

Sherman Alexie, American Writer

Reading, Knowledge, Survival, Learning

"It would be a good thing to buy books if one could also buy the time to read them, but one usually confuses the purchase of books with the acquisition of their contents."

Arthur Schopenhauer, German Philosopher

Reading, Books, Time, Knowledge

"A learned man is a sedentary, concentrated solitary enthusiast, who searches through books to discover some particular grain of truth upon which he has set his heart. If the passion for reading conquers him, his gains dwindle and vanish between his fingers. A reader, on the other hand, must check the desire for learning at the outset; if knowledge sticks to him well and good, but to go in pursuit of it, to read on a system, to become a specialist or an authority, is very apt to kill what suits us to consider the more humane passion for pure and disinterested reading."

Virginia Woolf, British Author

Reading, Learning, Passion, Knowledge

"If time is precious, no book that will not improve by repeated readings deserves to be read at all."

Thomas Carlyle, Scottish Philosopher

Reading, Time, Values, Wisdom

"And every book, you find, has its own social group--friends of its own it wants to introduce you to, like a party in the library that need never, ever end."

Caitlin Moran, British Journalist

Reading, Books, Community, Connection, Friendship

"I am a machine condemned to devour books."

Karl Marx, German Philosopher

Reading, Obsession, Knowledge, Books

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

Bertrand Russell, British Philosopher

Reading, Pride, Books, Enjoyment

"Read for the sake of using others knowledge to find your own inner guidance."

Matthew Donnelly, American Author

Reading, Knowledge, Guidance, Intuition

Explore more quotes by William Gaddis

"There is nothing more distressing or tiresome than a writer standing in front of an audience and reading his work."

Reading, Work, Nothing, Writer

"He was the only person caught in the collapse, and afterward, most of his work was recovered too, and it is still spoken of, when it is noted, with high regard, though seldom played."

Work,

"What is it they want from the man that they didn't get from the work? What do they expect? What is there left when he's done with his work, what's any artist but the dregs of his work, the human shambles that follows it around?"

Work, Artist, Man, Want

"Justice? You get justice in the next world, in this world you have the law."

Justice, Law, World

"Stupidity is the deliberate cultivation of ignorance."

Ignorance, Stupidity

"We're comic. We're all comics. We live in a comic time. And the worse it gets the more comic we are."

Time,

"I see the player piano as the grandfather of the computer, the ancestor of the entire nightmare we live in, the birth of the binary world where there is no option other than yes or no and where there is no refuge."

Computer, World

"Power doesn't corrupt people, people corrupt power."

Power, People

"How some of the writers I come across get through their books without dying of boredom is beyond me."

Books, Boredom, Dying, Writers