Quotes from Andy Miller

It would be a good thing to buy books if one could also buy the time to read them; but one usually confuses the purchase of books with the acquisition of their contents.

We are creatures made as much by art as by experience and what we read in books is the sum of both.

Hell is other people, said Jean-Paul Sartre. Don't take this the wrong way, but I think he means you.

In short, this was a period in which the phrase 'you're never alone with a good book' started to sound less like a promise and more like a threat.

Reading is a broad church. But it is still a church.

On average, everyone has read The Da Vinci Code. You have probably read it. Even if you have not read it, statistically you have.

Moby-Dick is a long, grueling, convoluted graft. And yet, as soon as I completed it, once I could hold it at arm's length and admire its intricacy and design, I knew Moby-Dick was obviously, uncannily, a masterwork. It wormed into my subconsious; I dreamed about it for nights afterwards. Whereas when I finished The Da Vinci Code, which had taken little less than twelve hours from cover to cover, I chicked it aside and thought: wow - I really ought to read something good.

That's the trouble with stereotypes: they are not wholly disconnected from the truth.

Time fades away, in other words; it's not any reason for us to give up trying to make it better.

In the midst of nature's savagery, human beings sometimes (rarely) succeed in creating small oases warmed by love. Small, exclusive, enclosed spaces governed only by love and shared subjectivity.

Is it wrong to prefer books to people? Not at Christmas. A book is like a guest you have invited into your home, except you don't have to play Pictionary with it or supply it with biscuits and stollen.

It occurred to me that I had been extraordinarily fortunate to have grown up in a prosperous country in an era when, for pretty much the first time in its history, I could read whatever I wanted, whenever I wanted to. And what had I done with this freedom? I had slowly, though unintentionally, abused it. My reading life had become an accumulation of bad habits, short cuts and lies.

I don't know if you have ever tried to read Moby-Dick on a DS in a Tesco car park - I doubt you have - but I cannot recommend it. The two miniature screens, so in harmony with the escapades of Super Mario and Lego Batman, do not lend themselves to the study of this arcane, eldritch text; and nor does the constant clamor of a small boy in the back seat asking when he can have his DS back.

The thing that chiefly struck me was the rarity of really bookish people.

I felt the unmistakable certainty that I had been in the presence of great art, and that my heart had opened in reply.

When we find a painting or a novel or a musical we love, we are briefly connected to the best that human beings are capable of, in ourselves and others, and we are reminded that our path through the world must intersect with others. Whether we like it or not, we are not alone.

It's [kindle] a useful addition to our library, not a replacement for it.

The trouble with magical realism for me, as I suggested earlier, is that it is neither realistic nor magical.

All these sorts of book feature in The Year of Reading Dangerously, which could yet be called Fifty Shades of Great.

As a parent, it has been instructive to discover that the deep, instinctive love I feel for my own child is counterbalanced by the antipathy I feel towards other people's children.

I wanted to possess all the books I had already read, as well as all those I had not - every book in the whole wide world, in other words.

When I was in my early twenties, it seemed like everyone I knew – every male, I should say – read Bukowski. These men of my acquaintance listened to the Go-Betweens, drank Guinness from a straight glass and loved Bukowski like little girls love ponies.