This principle of nature being very remote from the conceptions of philosophers, I forbore to describe it in that book, least I should be accounted an extravagant freak and so prejudice my readers against all those things which were the main designe of the book.
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Madame Picard believed that a child should be allowed to read anything: ‘A book never does any harm if it is well written.’ While she was there, I had once asked permission to read Madame Bovary and my mother, in an oversweet voice, had said: ‘But if my darling reads books like that at his age, what will he do when he grows up?’ ‘I shall live them!’ This reply had met with the most complete and lasting success.
One book opens another.
It [Joyce’s “Ulysses”] plays on the reader’s sympathies to his own undoing unless sleep kindly intervenes and puts a stop to this drain of energy. Arrived at page 135, after making several heroic efforts to get at the book, to “do it justice”, as the phrase goes, I fell at last into profound slumber.
No serious book can now be sure of surviving.
An art book is a museum without walls.
There are two motives for reading a book: one, that you enjoy it; the other, that you can boast about it.
He settled deeper into the armchair and put his feet up on the fender. It was bliss, it was eternity. Suddenly, as one sometimes does with a book of which one knows that one will ultimately read and reread very word, he opened it at a different place and found himself at the third chapter.
No book can ever be finished. While working on it we learn just enough to find it immature the moment we turn away from it.
When I sit down to write a book, I do not say to myself, ‘I am going to produce a work of art.’ I write it because there is some lie that I want to expose, some fact to which I want to draw attention, and my initial concern is to get a hearing.
