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"An allegory is not meant to be taken literally. There is a great lack of comprehension on the part of some readers."
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"As a reader you recognise that feeling when you're lost in a book? You know the one - when whatever's going on around you seems less real than what you're reading and all you want to do is keep going deeper into the story whether it's about being halfway up a mountain in Brazil in 1823 of in love with a man you aren't sure you can trust or fighting a war in the last human outpost, somewhere beyond the moon. Well, if you're writing that book it's real for you too."

"He who dreads hostility too much is unfit to rule."

"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."

"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."

"Reading takes time, and the glass teat takes too much of it."

"The more you read, the less apt you are to make a fool of yourself with your pen or word processor."
Explore more quotes by Naguib Mahfouz

"I didn't make any money from my writing until much later. I published about 80 stories for nothing. I spent on literature."

"Winning Nobel imposed on me a lifestyle to which I am not used and which I would not have preferred."

"There are no heroes in most of my stories. I look at our society with a critical eye and find nothing extraordinary in the people I see."

"You can tell whether a man is clever by his answers. You can tell whether a man is wise by his questions."

"My countrymen have the right to shake my hand and talk to me if they so wish. Don't forget that their support and their reading of my works is what brought me the Nobel prize."

"We used the Western style to express our own themes and stories. But don't forget that our heritage includes The Thousand and One Nights."
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