"It is a good rule after reading a new book, never to allow yourself another new one till you have read an old one in between.
We read to know we are not alone.
More C. S. Lewis quotes
"In order to pronounce a book bad it is not enough to discover that it elicits no good response from ourselves, for that might be our fault.
"The first demand any work of art makes upon us is surrender. Look. Listen. Receive. Get yourself out of the way. (There is no good asking first whethe...
"The true reader reads every work seriously in the sense that he reads it whole-heartedly, makes himself as receptive as he can. But for that very reas...
"For I need not remind such an audience as this that the neat sorting out of books into age-groups, so dear to publishers, has only a very sketchy rela...
"The literary man re-reads, other men simply read.
"It is very rarely that a middle-aged man finds an author who gives him, what he knew so often in his teens and twenties, the sense of having opened a ...
"An unliterary man may be defined as one who reads books once only. . . . We do not enjoy a story fully at the first reading. Not till the curiosity, t...
"We may be sure that the characteristic blindness of the twentieth century - the blindness about which posterity will ask, "But how could they have tho...
"A young man who wishes to remain a sound atheist cannot be too careful of his reading.
"The truly wide taste in reading is that which enables a man to find something for his needs on the sixpenny tray outside any secondhand bookshop.
"The truly wide taste in reading is that which enables a man to find something for his needs on the sixpenny tray outside any secondhand bookshop. The ...
"Literature adds to reality, it does not simply describe it. It enriches the necessary competencies that daily life requires and provides; and in this ...
"We do not enjoy a story fully at the first reading.
"No book is really worth reading at the age of ten which is not equally – and often far more – worth reading at the age of fifty and beyond.