Personally, I am a hedonistic reader; I have never read a book merely because it was ancient. I read books for the aesthetic emotions they offer me, and I ignore the commentaries and criticism. Jorge Luis Borges, Seven Nights
He liked the mere act of reading, the magic of turning scratches on a page into words inside his head. John Green, An Abundance of Katherines
From that time on, the world was hers for the reading. She would never be lonely again, never miss the lack of intimate friends. Books became her friends and there was one for every mood. There was poetry for quiet companionship. There was adventure when she tired of quiet hours. There would be love stories when she came into adolescence and when she wanted to feel a closeness to someone she could read a biography. On that day when she first knew she could read, she made a vow to read one book a day as long as she lived. Betty Smith, A Tree Grows in Brooklyn
Cram your head with characters and stories. Abuse your library privileges. Never stop looking at the world, and never stop reading to find out what sense other people have made of it. If people give you a hard time and tell you to get your nose out of a book, tell them you’re working. Tell them it’s research. Tell them to pipe down and leave you alone. Jennifer Weiner
Somebody who only reads newspapers and at best books of contemporary authors looks to me like an extremely near-sighted person who scorns eyeglasses. He is completely dependent on the prejudices and fashions of his times, since he never gets to see or hear anything else. Albert Einstein
One of the great things about books is sometimes there are some fantastic pictures. George W Bush
The best books... are those that tell you what you know already. George Orwell, 1984
‘This past is a curious thing. It’s with you all the time. I suppose an hour never passes without you’re thinking of things that happened ten or twenty years ago. And yet most of the time it’s got no reality; it’s just a set of facts you learned like a lot of stuff in the history books. Then, some chance or sound or smell, especially smell, sets you going. And the past doesn’t merely come back to you: you are actually in the past.’ Arena: George Orwell I: Such Were the Joys, BBC 1983
George Orwell: One of the most remarkable figures of twentieth century literature. For Orwell was not one of those writers whose life disappeared into his work; his history is a history of the troubled times in which he lived. ibid.
‘From a very early age, perhaps from the age of five or six, I knew that when I grew up I should be a writer.’ ibid.
‘He was one of those boys who seemed born old.’ ibid. teacher
‘The truth is that kids aren’t in any way poetic. They’re merely savage little animals. Except that no animal is a quarter as selfish.’ ibid.
We know almost nothing of his life in Paris. ibid.
By 1933 Eric Blair, now George Orwell, had published his first book, Down and Out in Paris and in London. Arena: George Orwell II: Road to Wigan Pier
‘I don’t think he liked his fellow man at all.’ ibid. Humphrey Dakin, 1971
£500 to write a book about the depressed areas of the north. ibid.
‘He went to Spain because he thought we must fight fascism.’ Arena: George Orwell III: Homage to Catalonia, village neighbour
The civil war in Spain broke out on the 18th July 1936. General Franco’s attack on the beleaguered Spanish republic had angered a great many English intellectuals on the left. ibid.
For Orwell, after his experience in the Spanish Civil War, totalitarianism had become the enemy. He saw the coming war in Europe as a conflict between two distorted ideologies: Nazi fascism and Stalinist communism. Arena: George Orwell IV: The Lion & The Unicorn
‘One must above all die fighting.’ ibid.
‘The goose step for instance is one of the most terrible sights in the world.’ ibid.
28th August: ‘I am now definitely an employee of the BBC.’ ibid.
Orwell was denied any pleasure from the victory celebrations at the end of World War II. He and his wife Eileen had adopted a baby boy Richard but Orwell was separated from them working as a war correspondent when she was suddenly taken into hospital with what appeared to be a routine operation. Arena: George Orwell V: 1984
Isolated and angry in a world of gloom and shortages, Orwell struggled on alone with his adopted son. He sought female companionship with the desperation of the very lonely. ibid.
‘He had quite extensive disease of both lungs.’ ibid. Dr James Williamson
Sometimes I think I wasn’t born but I just came out of an ink blot. (Literature & Write & Author & Book) Arena: Hilary Mantel: Return to Wolf Hall, BBC 2020
‘It causes me to reflect on different layers of reality – fact, history, myth – how they merge into one.’ ibid.
‘I think you’re allowed to not always know what it means.’ Arena: James Joyce’s Ulysses, Howard Jacobson, BBC 2022
‘Ulysses takes place over just one day and night in Dublin.’ ibid. dude
‘Nothing happens. A man walks around Dublin.’ ibid. Salman Rushdie
‘He paradoxically achieves a kind of heroism.’ ibid. dude
When Ulysses was first published in Paris in 1922 it changed modern writing for ever. With its arcane references to Homer’s Odyssey and a bewildering variety of styles, it was anti-Catholic, sexually explicit and banned in Britain and America. ibid.
I believe in the magic of books. I believe that during certain periods in our lives we are drawn to particular books – whether it’s strolling down the aisles of a bookshop with no idea whatsoever of what it is that we want to read and suddenly finding the most perfect, most wonderfully suitable book staring us right in the face. Unblinking. Or a chance meeting with a stranger or friend who recommends a book we would never ordinarily reach for. Books have the ability to find their own way into our lives. Cecelia Ahern
If you truly love a book, you should sleep with it, write in it, read aloud from it, and fill its pages with muffin crumbs. Anne Fadiman
I read the fuck out of every book I can get my hands on. Nick Hornby
All the books we own, both read and unread, are the fullest expression of self we have at our disposal ... But with each passing year, and with each whimsical purchase, our libraries become more and more able to articulate who we are, whether we read the books or not. Nick Hornby, The Polysyllabic Spree
A lot of the people who read a bestselling novel, for example, do not read much other fiction. By contrast, the audience for an obscure novel is largely composed of people who read a lot. That means the least popular books are judged by people who have the highest standards, while the most popular are judged by people who literally do not know any better. An American who read just one book this year was disproportionately likely to have read The Lost Symbol by Dan Brown. He almost certainly liked it. The Economist
Few pleasures, for the true reader, rival the pleasure of browsing unhurriedly among books: old books, new books, library books, other people’s books, one’s own books – it does not matter whose or where. Simply to be among books, glancing at one here, reading a page from one over there, enjoying them all as objects to be touched, looked at, even smelt, is a deep satisfaction. And often, very often, while browsing haphazardly, looking for nothing in particular, you pick up a volume that suddenly excites you, and you know that this one of all the others you must read. Those are great moments – and the books we come across like that are often the most memorable. Aidan Chambers
I’m old-fashioned and think that reading books is the most glorious pastime that humankind has yet devised. Wislawa Szymborska
Never put off till tomorrow the book you can read today. Holbrook Jackson
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. Douglas Coupland
I love the smell of book ink in the morning. Umberto Eco
Poetry is not the most important thing in life ... I’d much rather lie in a hot bath reading Agatha Christie and sucking sweets. Dylan Thomas
Books that told me everything about the wasp, except why. Dylan Thomas, A Child’s Christmas in Wales
Reading is merely a surrogate for thinking for yourself; it means letting someone else direct your thoughts. Many books, moreover, serve merely to show how many ways there are of being wrong, and how far astray you yourself would go if you followed their guidance. You should read only when your own thoughts dry up, which will of course happen frequently enough even to the best heads; but to banish your own thoughts so as to take up a book is a sin against the holy ghost; it is like deserting untrammelled nature to look at a herbarium or engravings of landscapes. Arthur Schopenheauer, Essay and Aphorism