Anne Fadiman quotes

For me, literature is a way of enlarging myself by learning about people who are not like me. (Anne Fadiman)

I am very grateful to the electronic world for making my life easier, but there is something about holding a book - the smell and the world of association. Even when e-books are perfected, as they surely will be, it will be like being in bed with a very well-made robot rather than a warm, soft, human being whom you love.

Anne Fadiman

If you truly love a book, you should sleep with it, write in it, read aloud from it, and fill its pages with muffin crumbs.

Anne Fadiman

In my view, nineteen pounds of old books are at least nineteen times as delicious as one pound of fresh caviar.

Anne Fadiman

When I visit a new bookstore, I demand cleanliness, computer monitors, and rigorous alphabetization. When I visit a secondhand bookstore, I prefer indifferent housekeeping, sleeping cats, and sufficient organizational chaos.

Anne Fadiman

One reason we have children I think is to learn that parts of ourselves we had given up for dead are merely dormant and that the old joys can re emerge fresh and new and in a completely different form.

Anne Fadiman

I can think of few better ways to introduce a child to books than to let her stack them, upend them, rearrange them, and get her fingerprints all over them.

Anne Fadiman

I have never been able to resist a book about books.

Anne Fadiman

Books wrote our life story, and as they accumulated on our shelves (and on our windowsills, and underneath our sofa, and on top of our refrigerator), they became chapters in it themselves.

Anne Fadiman

One of the convenient things about literature is that, despite copyrights [...] a book belongs to the reader as well as to the writer.

Anne Fadiman

I can imagine few worse fates than walking around for the rest of one's life wearing a typo. (Anne Fadiman)

To use an electronics analogy, closing a book on a bookmark is like pressing the Stop button, whereas when you leave the book facedown, you've only pressed Pause.

Anne Fadiman

The most important thing when starting out with essay writing is to find a voice with which you're comfortable. You need to find a persona that is very much like you, but slightly caricatured.

Anne Fadiman

I always wanted to be a writer, and I did want to be a novelist. In college I took a couple of classes that taught me I would never be a novelist. I discovered I had no imagination. My short stories were always thinly veiled memoir.

Anne Fadiman

My brother and I were able to fantasize far more extravagantly about our parents' tastes and desires, their aspirations and their vices, by scanning their bookcases than by snooping in their closest. Their selves were on their shelves.

Anne Fadiman

I would like to attribute my range of interests to being an independent intellectual, but although I'm independent, I'm not sure I qualify as an intellectual. Basically, I'm an old-fashioned amateur.

Anne Fadiman