"The reason Saul Bellow doesn't talk to me anymore is because he knows his new novels are not worth reading."

Reading, Reason, Talk, Worth

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"The reason Saul Bellow doesn't talk to me anymore is because he knows his new novels are not worth reading."

Exlpore more Reading quotes

"By reading Huckleberry Finn I felt I was able to justify my act of going into the mountain forest at night and sleeping among the trees with a sense of security which I could never find indoors."

Kenzaburo Oe, Japanese Writer

Reading, Act, Night, Security

"You can't get a cup of tea big enough or a book long enough to suit me."

C. S. Lewis, British Author

Reading, Tea

"There is no other enjoyment like reading."

Jane Austen, British Writer

Reading, Joy, Books, Imagination

"One must be an inventor to read well. There is then creative reading as well as creative writing."

Ralph Waldo Emerson, American Poet

Reading, Writing

"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

"I read anything that's going to be interesting. But you don't know what it is until you've read it. Somewhere in a book on the history of false teeth there'll be the making of a novel."

Terry Pratchett, English Author

Reading, Truth, Power, Imagination, Happiness

"Books smell and feel better. They have that wonderful thingness of turning the pages."

Neil Gaiman, British Author

Reading, Books, Experience, Joy

"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

"The decision to write in prose instead of poetry is made more by the readers than by writers. Almost no one is interested in reading narrative in verse."

Robert Morgan, American Soldier

Reading, Poetry, Decision, Prose

"The true reader reads every work seriously in the sense that he reads it whole-heartedly, makes himself as receptive as he can. But for that very reason he cannot possibly read every work solemly or gravely. For he will read 'in the same spirit that the author writ.'... He will never commit the error of trying to munch whipped cream as if it were venison."

C. S. Lewis, British Author

Reading, Spirit, Humor, Seriousness

Explore more quotes by Leslie Fiedler

"The novel is the first art form that is an honest-to-god commodity. That's what makes it different from both high art and folk art."

Art, First, Folk

"Writers always know whether you like them or not."

Media, Writers

"I love it now that a large minority of people who are handicapped prefer to call themselves crippled. This is all part of the game, like queer theory."

Love, People, Minority, Now

"Saul Bellow never took my advice when he was my friend."

Friendship, Friend, Advice

"Raymond Carver is good. I think he'll be appreciated more and more. He's an easy writer to imitate."

Literature, Writer

"Hemingway seems to be in a funny position. People nowadays can't identify with him closely as a member of their own generation, and he isn't yet historical."

Fun, Funny, People

"Foucault was the one person I met in France that I could talk to. He was a mensch. You know whether you agree with him or not because you know what he is saying."

Philosophy, France, Saying, Talk

"I've been writing about James Fenimore Cooper. He was not a writer. Here was a man who was 30 years old and had never put anything more than his signature on paper."

Man, Old, Writer, Writing

"The novel doesn't come into existence until certain methods of reproducing fiction come along."

Existence, Fiction

"Critics? How do they happen? I know how it happened to me. I would send a poem or story to a magazine and they would say this doesn't suit our needs precisely but on the other hand you sound interesting. Would you be interested in doing a review?"

Needs, Sound