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"I don't like to read novels where the novelist tells me what to think about the situation and the characters. I prefer to discover for myself."
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"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."

"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."

"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."

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

"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."

"There are two motives for reading a book; one, that you enjoy it; the other, that you can boast about it."
Explore more quotes by Frederick Wiseman

"I hope that not only my documentaries, but everybody's documentaries, last. It will really confuse historians in the next century, because they'll have, in addition to all the print material, they'll have all these pictures to look at."

"You have to edit the material. That assumes that some kind of a mind is operating in relation to the material. Not all minds are the same. Every aspect of filmmaking requires choice. The selection of the subject, the shooting, editing and length are all aspects of choice."

"Whether you're a newspaper journalist, a lawyer, a doctor. You have to organize your thoughts."

"I don't like to read novels where the novelist tells me what to think about the situation and the characters. I prefer to discover for myself."
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