“All of us are so strange – me included. I was a character in a book, and now I’ve come out of the book and am talking and walking …. At the same time, it seems like the real me has become part of the book.”
Banana Yoshimoto
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
The book becomes part of the history of our self-understanding. The stories that mean most to us join the process by which we come to be securely our own.
Francis Spufford
Much of the pleasure of reading comes from the egotistical sense that we are clever enough to understand.
Janet Burroway
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
It’s that powerlessness that I want to help people break out of because I don’t accept it is inevitable in any circumstances. I think books can do that. They give you strength, they give you purpose, they give you hope.
Jeanette Winterson
I’m starting to realize all readers are writing at least half the book they are reading. Maybe when I write I am responding to that childhood experience of reading, that unequivocal, sensuous absorption. I guess I found writing through reading.
Lisa Moore
All in all, the creative act is not performed by the artist alone; the spectator brings the work in contact with the external world.
Marcel Duchamp
It’s the reader who has the relationship with the book. Readability is actually in your hands, not mine.
Margaret Atwood
The words propose, and the reader’s imagination disposes.
Margaret Atwood
Anyone who writes a book spins a web. Anyone who reads a book is struggling in a web.
Maria Gripe
The reader needs to be connected to the book almost to the point that they lose their awareness that the book is a made thing
Michael Redhill
