“Reading, like all work, has its rules. A perfect knowledge of a few writers and a few subjects is more valuable than a superficial one of a great many. The fine points of a piece of writing are seldom apparent at first reading. In youth, one should search among books as one searches the world for friends, and once these friends are found, chosen, and adopted, one must go into retirement with them. Intimacy with Montaigne, Saint Simon, Retz, Balzac, or Proust would be enough to enrich one's whole life.”

— André Maurois

Un Art de Vivre (The Art of Living) (1939), The Art of Working

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André Maurois 202

French writer 1885–1967

Neil Postman (1931–2003) American writer and academic

Language Education in a Knowledge Context (1980)
Context: Since there is no such thing as complete knowledge of a subject, one is always working to improve one's reading, writing, etc., of a subject. As Thomas Henry Huxley said, "If a little knowledge is a dangerous thing, is there anyone who knows so much as to be out of danger?" …. The problems of learning to read or write are inexhaustible.

“Books, like friends, should be few and well chosen.”

Samuel Paterson (1728–1802) English bookseller and auctioneer

Joineriana: or The Book of Scraps (London: 1772), Vol. I, p. 40

“If one reads enough books one has a fighting chance. Or better, one's chances of survival increase with each book one reads.”

Sherman Alexie (1966) Native American author and filmmaker

“A book that one has not read yet is always more exciting than a book one has memorized.”

Cassandra Clare The City of Lost Souls

Source: City of Lost Souls

“The reason a writer writes a book is to forget a book and the reason a reader reads one is to remember it.”

Thomas Wolfe (1900–1938) American writer

“If you want to read a perfect book there is only one way: write it.”

Ambrose Bierce (1842–1914) American editorialist, journalist, short story writer, fabulist, and satirist

Source: Epigrams, p. 353

“When one reads any strongly individual piece of writing, one has the impression of seeing a face somewhere behind the page. It is not necessarily the actual face of the writer.”

George Orwell (1903–1950) English author and journalist

"Charles Dickens" (1939)
Context: When one reads any strongly individual piece of writing, one has the impression of seeing a face somewhere behind the page. It is not necessarily the actual face of the writer. I feel this very strongly with Swift, with Defoe, with Fielding, Stendhal, Thackeray, Flaubert, though in several cases I do not know what these people looked like and do not want to know. What one sees is the face that the writer ought to have. Well, in the case of Dickens I see a face that is not quite the face of Dickens's photographs, though it resembles it. It is the face of a man of about forty, with a small beard and a high colour. He is laughing, with a touch of anger in his laughter, but no triumph, no malignity. It is the face of a man who is always fighting against something, but who fights in the open and is not frightened, the face of a man who is generously angry — in other words, of a nineteenth-century liberal, a free intelligence, a type hated with equal hatred by all the smelly little orthodoxies which are now contending for our souls.

“Good books, like good friends, are few and chosen; the more select, the more enjoyable.”

Amos Bronson Alcott (1799–1888) American teacher and writer

Source: Tablets

“A businessman who reads Business Week is lost to fame. One who reads Proust is marked for greatness.”

John Kenneth Galbraith book The Affluent Society

Source: The Affluent Society (1958), Chapter 13, Section V, p. 155

“It is absurd to have a hard and fast rule about what one should read and what one shouldn't. More than half of modern culture depends on what one shouldn't read.”

Oscar Wilde The Importance of Being Earnest

Algernon, Act I
Source: The Importance of Being Earnest (1895)

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