"And it's impossible for me to read Henry James."

Reading, Read

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"And it's impossible for me to read Henry James."

Exlpore more Reading quotes

"I don't think I make much of a distinction between the 'real' and the 'fantastic.' They both seem to be threads in the same cloth as far as I'm concerned."

Alice Hoffman, American Author

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

Stephen King, American Author

Reading, Time, Distraction, Television

"It can't be supposed," said Joe. "Tho' I'm oncommon fond of reading, too."Are you, Joe?"Oncommon. Give me," said Joe, "a good book, or a good newspaper, and sit me down afore a good fire, and I ask no better. Lord!" he continued, after rubbing his knees a little, "when you do come to a J and a O, and says you, 'Here, at last, is a J-O, Joe,' how interesting reading is!"

Charles Dickens, English Novelist

Reading, Joy, Interest, Fire

"I think that every reader on earth has a list of cherished books as unique as their fingerprints....I think that, as you age, you tend to gravitate towards the classics, but those aren't the books that give you the same sort of hope for the world that a cherished book does."

Doug Coupland, Canadian Author

Reading, Books, Memory, Hope

"Reading, solitude, idleness, a soft and sedentary life, intercourse with women and young people, these are perilous paths for a young man, and these lead him constantly into danger."

Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Swiss Philosopher

Reading, Women, Life, People, Danger

"The only important thing in a book is the meaning that it has for you."

W. Somerset Maugham, British Playwright

Reading, Books, Meaning, Importance, Self

"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."

Arthur Schopenhauer, German Philosopher

Reading, Reflection, Mind, Knowledge

"Most of what makes a book 'good' is that we are reading it at the right moment for us."

Alain de Botton, English Writer

Reading, Books, Time, Life

"And what is the use of a book," thought Alice, "without pictures or conversation?"

Lewis Carroll, English Author

Reading, Books, Conversation, Imagination, Engagement

"Those who are incapable of committing great crimes do not readily suspect them in others."

Francois de La Rochefoucauld, French Writer

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Explore more quotes by Norman MacCaig

"However, I learned something. I thought that if the young person, the student, has poetry in him or her, to offer them help is like offering a propeller to a bird."

Poetry, Thought, Help

"Well, I'm a light traveller. I chuck things away."

Minimalism, Light

"I don't think of myself all the time."

Time,

"And if they haven't got poetry in them, there's nothing you can do that will produce it."

Poetry, Nothing, Will

"I don't care whether a book is a first edition or not. I'm not a bibliophile in that word's natural sense."

Care, First, Sense, Word

"A terrible thing about getting oldish is that your friends start dying, and in the last ten years I have lost seven or eight of my closest."

Friendship, Dying, Friends, Years

"When I talk of hearing a poet's voice speaking, I always think of it as in the presence of the man."

Poetry, Hearing, Man, Talk, Voice

"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."

People,

"I'm very gregarious, but I love being in the hills on my own."

Love, Being

"When I was asked to be Writer in Residence at Edinburgh I thought, you can't teach poetry. This is ridiculous."

Poetry, Thought, Writer