top of page
.png){kind=small}
"I think technique can be taught but I think the only way to learn to write is to read, and I see writing and reading as completely related. One almost couldn't exist without the other."
Standard
Customized
More
"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."
Author Name
Personal Development
"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."
Author Name
Personal Development
"If one reads enough books one has a fighting chance. Or better, one's chances of survival increase with each book one reads."
Author Name
Personal Development
"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."
Author Name
Personal Development
"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."
Author Name
Personal Development
"If time is precious, no book that will not improve by repeated readings deserves to be read at all."
Author Name
Personal Development
"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."
Author Name
Personal Development
"I am a machine condemned to devour books."
Author Name
Personal Development
"There are two motives for reading a book; one, that you enjoy it; the other, that you can boast about it."
Author Name
Personal Development
"Read for the sake of using others knowledge to find your own inner guidance."
Author Name
Personal Development
More
"I think technique can be taught but I think the only way to learn to write is to read, and I see writing and reading as completely related. One almost couldn't exist without the other."
Reading
"I think it's linked to the realisation that we're not going to live forever and that the way of saying and the language become more important than the story."
Language
"I used to take five or six books away and bring five or six books back. Nobody gave me direction or advice and I read much in the way that a boy might watch television."
Advice
"Yes, but also one of the problems for a novelist in Ireland is the fact that there are no formal manners. I mean some people have beautiful manners but there's no kind of agreed form of manners."
People
"The way I see it is that all the ol' guff about being Irish is a kind of nonsense. I mean, I couldn't be anything else no matter what I tried to be. I couldn't be Chinese or Japanese."
Being
"I think there's a great difference in consciousness in that same way in that when we're young we read books for the story, for the excitement of the story - and there comes a time when you realise that all stories are more or less the same story."
Time
"I belong to the middle class that grew up very influenced by the Catholic church. The people of the novel are from a more pagan and practical world in which the Christianity is just a veneer."
People
"I think fiction is a very serious thing, that while it is fiction, it is also a revelation of truth, or facts."
Truth
"Amongst Women concentrated on the family, and the new book concentrates on a small community. The dominant units in Irish society are the family and the locality. The idea was that the whole world would grow out from that small space."
Family
"I love the description of Gothic churches before the printed word, that they were the bibles of the poor."
Love
bottom of page