I was at the job of reading it for days and days, endlessly daunted and halted by its laborious dullness, its flatulent fatuity, its almost fabulous inconsequentiality.

A bad book is as much of a labor to write as a good one; it comes as sincerely from the author's soul.

The truth is you have to get on top of the reading as soon as possible and you have to keep in mind that this is the sum of people’s YEARS of hard labour, sweat and pain that you hold in your hands. Without being able to meet all the people who make that thing in your hand possible, you have to conjure up their presence, interact with every single book with great reverence.

One glance at a book and you hear the voice of another person, perhaps someone dead for 1,000 years. To read is to voyage through time.

It takes great labor to uncover the convincing simple speech of the heart. Poetic candor comes with hard labor, so even does impetuosity and impudence.

I thought with melancholy how an author spends months writing a book, and maybe puts his heart’s blood into it, and then it lies about unread till the reader has nothing else in the world to do.

If books are indeed magic (and does anyone really believe otherwise?), then they are a collaborative magic between author and reader.

The history of most fictions would be far stranger than the fictions themselves ; but it would be a dark and sad chronicle. Half the works that constitute the charm of our leisure, that give their own interest to the long November evening, or add to the charm of a summer noon beneath the greenwood tree, are the offspring of poverty and of pain. ... How often is the writer obliged to put his own trouble, his suffering, or his sorrow aside, to finish the task ! The hand may tremble, the eyes fill with unbidden tears, and the temples throb with feverish pain, yet how often is there some hard and harsh necessity, which says, "the work must be done.”

Books have to be read (worse luck, for it takes a long time); it is the only way of discovering what they contain.

One suffers work, even if one enjoys doing it.

Long books, when read, are usually overpraised, because the reader wishes to convince others and himself that he has not wasted his time.

Long books, when read, are usually overpraised, because the reader wants to convince others and himself that he has not wasted his time.

It takes a heap of loafing to write a book.

I have suffered for this book; now it's your turn.