Ian Mcewan Reading Quotations

Perhaps the greatest reading pleasure has an element of self-annihilation. To be so engrossed that you barely know you exist.

In a story you only had to wish, you only had to write it down and you could have the world...It seemed so obvious now that it was too late: a story was a form of telepathy. By means of inking symbols onto a page, she was able to send thoughts and feelings from her mind to her reader's. It was a magical process, so commonplace that no one stopped to wonder at it. Reading a sentence and understanding it were the same thing; as with the crooking of a finger, nothing lay between them. There was no gap during which the symbols were unraveled.

Most of humanity gets by without reading novels or poetry, and no one would deny the richness of their thoughts.

She had lolled about for three years at Girton with the kind of books she could equally have read at home--Jane Austen, Dickens, Conrad, all in the library downstairs, in complete sets. How had that pursuit, reading the novels that others took as their leisure, let her think she was superior to anyone else?

Reading groups, readings, breakdowns of book sales all tell the same story: when women stop reading, the novel will be dead.