Quotes by British Authors - Page 617

A book is not completed till it's read.
Salman Rushdie
I was a hugely unchaperoned reader, and I would wander into my local public library and there sat the world, waiting for me to look at it, to find out about it, to discover who I might be insid
Patrick Ness
I was always going to the bookcase for another sip of the divine specific.
Virginia Woolf
As readers, we remain in the nursery stage so long as we cannot distinguish between taste and judgment, so long, that is, as the only possible verdicts we can pass on a book are two: this I like; this I don't like.For an adult reader, the possible verdicts are five: I can see this is good and I like it; I can see this is good but I don't like it; I can see this is good and, though at present I don't like it, I believe that with perseverance I shall come to like it; I can see that this is trash but I like it; I can see that this is trash and I don't like it.
W.H. Auden
She sewed as she read. For the Vicar considered that sewing was an occupation and that reading was not. He was silent as long as his daughter sewed and when she read he talked.
May Sinclair
The appeal of reading, she thought, lay in its indifference: there was something undeferring about literature. Books did not care who was reading them or whether one read them or not. All readers were equal, herself included. Literature, she thought, is a commonwealth; letters a republic.
Alan Bennett
Still in my coat and hat, I sank onto the stair to read the letter. (I never read without making sure I am in a secure position. I have been like this ever since the age of seven when, sitting on a high wall and reading The Water Babies, I was so seduced by the descriptions of underwater life that I unconsciously relaxed my muscles. Instead of being held buoyant by the water that so vividly surrounded me in my mind, I plummeted to the ground and knocked myself out. I can still feel the scar under my fringe now. Reading can be dangerous.)
Diane Setterfield
To read a newspaper is to refrain from reading something worthwhile. [....] The first discipline of education must therefore be to refuse resolutely to feed the mind with canned chatter.
Aleister Crowley
My early and invincible love of reading--I would not exchange for the treasures of India.
Edward Gibbon
Since we are destined to live out our lives in the prison of our minds, it is our duty to furnish it well.
Peter Ustinov
We read to know we are not alone.
C.S. Lewis
The most essential and fundamental aspect of culture is the study of literature, since this is an education in how to picture and understand human situations.
Iris Murdoch
I like books that aren't just lovely but that have memories in themselves. Just like playing a song, picking up a book again that has memories can take you back to another place or another time.
Emma Watson
If I could always read I should never feel the want of company.
George Gordon Byron
He that loves reading has everything within his reach.
William Godwin
A child's reading is guided by pleasure, but his pleasure is undifferentiated; he cannot distinguish, for example, between aesthetic pleasure and the pleasures of learning or daydreaming. In adolescence we realize that there are different kinds of pleasure, some of which cannot be enjoyed simultaneously, but we need help from others in defining them. Whether it be a matter of taste in food or taste in literature, the adolescent looks for a mentor in whose authority he can believe. He eats or reads what his mentor recommends and, inevitably, there are occasions when he has to deceive himself a little; he has to pretend that he enjoys olives or War and Peace a little more than he actually does. Between the ages of twenty and forty we are engaged in the process of discovering who we are, which involves learning the difference between accidental limitations which it is our duty to outgrow and the necessary limitations of our nature beyond which we cannot trespass with impunity. Few of us can learn this without making mistakes, without trying to become a little more of a universal man than we are permitted to be. It is during this period that a writer can most easily be led astray by another writer or by some ideology. When someone between twenty and forty says, apropos of a work of art, 'I know what I like,'he is really saying 'I have no taste of my own but accept the taste of my cultural milieu', because, between twenty and forty, the surest sign that a man has a genuine taste of his own is that he is uncertain of it. After forty, if we have not lost our authentic selves altogether, pleasure can again become what it was when we were children, the proper guide to what we should read.
W.H. Auden
Loads of children read books about dinosaurs, underwater monsters, dragons, witches, aliens, and robots. Essentially, the people who read SF, fantasy and horror haven't grown out of enjoying the strange and weird.
China Miéville
You can't just be reading books all the time and leave the writting of them to others.
Joseph Delaney
I discovered that I felt at home and alive in the silence, which compelled me to enter my interior world and around there. Without the distraction of constant conversation, the words on the page began to speak directly to my inner self. They were no long expressing ideas that were simply interesting intellectually, but were talking directly to my own yearning and perplexity.
Karen Armstrong
I never need to find time to read. When people say to me, ‘Oh, yeah, I love reading. I would love to read, but I just don’t have time,’ I’m thinking, ‘How can you not have time?’ I read when I’m drying my hair. I read in the bath. I read when I’m sitting in the bathroom. Pretty much anywhere I can do the job one-handed, I read.
J.K. Rowling
Deprived of their newspapers or a novel, reading-addicts will fall back onto cookery books, on the literature which is wrapped around bottles of patent medicine, on those instructions for keeping the contents crisp which are printed on the outside of boxes of breakfast cereals. On anything.
Aldous Huxley
For me to see is to read. It has always been that way.
Diane Setterfield
What a blessing it is to love books.
Elizabeth von Arnim
People who say they don't have time to read simply don't want to.
Julie Rugg
Long books, when read, are usually overpraised, because the reader wishes to convince others and himself that he has not wasted his time.
E.M. Forster
A book you finish reading is not the same book it was before you read it.
David Mitchell
I'm wondering what to read next." Matilda said. "I've finished all the children's books.
Roald Dahl
I don’t believe one reads to escape reality. A person reads to confirm a reality he knows is there, but which he has not experienced.
Lawrence Durrell
I read, much of the night, and go south in the winter.
T.S Eliot
I have good reason to be content,for thank God I can read andperhaps understand Shakespeare to his depths.
John Keats
For my whole life, my favorite activity was reading. It's not the most social pastime.
Audrey Hepburn
When I read a book, I put in all the imagination I can, so that it is almost like writing the book as well as reading it - or rather, it is like living it. It makes reading so much more exciting, but I don't suppose many people try to do it.
Dodie Smith
We may sit in our library and yet be in all quarters of the earth.
John Lubbock
Everybody is a book of blood; wherever we're opened, we're red.
Clive Barker
When the Day of Judgment dawns and people, great and small, come marching in to receive their heavenly rewards, the Almighty will gaze upon the mere bookworms and say to Peter, “Look, these need no reward. We have nothing to give them. They have loved reading.
Virginia Woolf
I am reading six books at once, the only way of reading; since, as you will agree, one book is only a single unaccompanied note, and to get the full sound, one needs ten others at the same time.
Virginia Woolf
That I can read and be happy while I am reading, is a great blessing.
Anthony Trollope
I am an omnivorous reader with a strangely retentive memory for trifles.
Arthur Conan Doyle
I can feel infinitely alive curled up on the sofa reading a book.
Benedict Cumberbatch
No entertainment is so cheap as reading, nor any pleasure so lasting.
Mary Wortley Montagu
A good bookshop is just a genteel Black Hole that knows how to read.
Terry Pratchett
My personal hobbies are reading, listening to music, and silence.
Edith Sitwell
After all, reading is arguably a far more creative and imaginative process than writing; when the reader creates emotion in their head, or the colors of the sky during the setting sun, or the smell of a warm summer's breeze on their face, they should reserve as much praise for themselves as they do for the writer - perhaps more.
Jasper Fforde
A library is a place where you can lose your innocence without losing your virginity.
Germaine Greer
Great art, she felt, had a calming effect on the viewer; it made one stop in awe, which is exactly what Damien Hirst and Andy Warhol did not do. You did not stop in awe. They stopped you in your tracks, perhaps, but that was not the same thing; awe was something quite different
Alexander McCall Smith
That a work of creation struggles and insistently demands to be brought into being is a fact that no genuine artist would think of denying.
Dorothy L. Sayers
All art is the result of one’s having been in danger of having gone through an experience all the way to the end when no one can go any further. This is what it is like to be an artist – you are unsteady on the edge of life like a swan before an anxious launching of himself on the floods where he is gently caught.
Edmund de Waal
We read to know we're not alone.
William Nicholson
Freedom and fullness of expression are of the essence of the art.
Virginia Woolf
Maybe we're all ongoing stories, defined at various stages of life, or whenever people oblige us to declare ourselves. Fiction is marvelous for studying this, allowing the writer and reader to leap decades in a sentence. No other art lets you bend time as much.
Tom Rachman
In my ArtI have butone fear:that we willfail to befearless.
Clive Barker
All good art is political. Between the lines of every book, the author implants messages for the unsuspecting reader. If not, what point does it serve?
Chloe Thurlow
Of course a miracle may happen, and you may be a great painter, but you must confess the chances are a million to one against it. It'll be an awful sell if at the end you have to acknowledge you've made a hash of it.""I've got to paint," he repeated."Supposing you're never anything more than third-rate, do you think it will have been worth while to give up everything? After all, in any other walk in life it doesn't matter if you're not very good; you can get along quite comfortably if you're just adequate; but it's different with an artist.""You blasted fool," he said."I don't see why, unless it's folly to say the obvious.""I tell you I've got to paint. I can't help myself. When a man falls into the water it doesn't matter how he swims, well or badly: he's got to get out or else he'll drown.
W Somerset Maugham
If art does not enlarge men's sympathies, it does nothing morally.
George Eliot
If you don't know it's impossible, it's easier to do.
Neil Gaiman
It does not much matter that an individual loses two or three hundred pounds in buying a bad picture, but it is to be regretted that a nation should lose two or three hundred thousand in raising a ridiculous building.
John Ruskin
People are fond of spouting out the old cliché about how Van Gogh never sold a painting in his lifetime. Somehow his example serves to justify to us, decades later, that there is merit in utter failure.Perhaps, but the man did commit suicide. The market for his work took off big-time shortly after his death. Had he decided to stick around another few decades he most likely would’ve entered old age quite prosperous. And sadly for failures everywhere, the cliché would have lost a lot of its power.The fact is, the old clichés work for us in abstract terms, but they never work out in real life quite the same way. Life is messy; clichés are clean and tidy.
Hugh MacLeod
Music is for souls & hearts to dance & sing.Art is for expressing your visionary being.Words are tools for exploring & celebrating.Time is a pool to swim & dream & create in.Waste not one jot of what you are given!Use everything you've got to maximise living.
Jay Woodman
The identification of fantasy is always an attempt to avoid one's own suffering: the identification of art is the sharing in the suffering of another.
W.H. Auden
And yet, in terms of its emotive potential, I still find art more attractive, currently, than books, which fail at a deeper level.
Andrew Miller