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Interesting Quotes

I'm collecting quotes about reading, about the apparent polarization between "literary fiction" and "popular fiction." I'd be interested in what you think.

"Readers of literary fiction expect to be challenged and like to be entertained; readers of popular fiction expect to be entertained and like to be challenged. They're often the same readers in a different mood." Daphne Clair

One of the problems, it seems to me, is that we have got it into our heads that books should be hard work, and that unless they're hard work, they're not doing us any good. Nick Hornby

“... we both understood that, along with the self-consciousness of adulthood, comes the compulsion to read books we don’t really want to read, books that are designed to challenge our minds and leave us feeling all the more accomplished for having read them. Books that are “worthy” of our precious time. Books we don’t necessarily want to read... (snip)

This weird craze for “responsible reading” has driven old-fashioned reading for sheer enjoyment into the closet. It makes women hide their romance novels. It’s turned Stephen King and Mary Higgins Clark into guilty pleasures. While “rediscovering your inner child” is generally thought to be a good thing, it doesn’t seem to apply to rediscovering our childish joy in books. You remember it, don’t you? What it was like to be so hungry to finish reading a story that you hid out under the sheets with a flashlight? That you never even heard your mother’s voice calling you to dinner because Nancy Drew and her pals were trapped in some dark cellar, and you had only one more chapter to go? You remember, don’t you, what it was like to read a book because you wanted to, not because it was good for you? Perhaps this explains the huge popularity of Harry Potter books among adults. It’s the only pleasurable reading we’ve been given official permission to enjoy, but only because we are obligated — as responsible adults, you know! — to find out what our children are up to ... Tess Gerritsen

But what's proper? Whose books will make us more intelligent? Not mine, that's for sure. But has Ian McEwan got the right stuff? Julian Barnes? Jane Austen, Zadie Smith, E. M. Forster? Hardy or Dickens? Those Dickens readers who famously waited on the dockside in New York for news of Little Nell – were they hoping to be educated? Dickens is Literary now, of course, because the books are old. But his work has survived not because he makes you think, but because he makes you feel, and he makes you laugh [*and cry], and you need to know what is going to happen to his characters. Nick Hornby [* my insert]

She remembered the joy of books before she began listening to literary critics tell her what was good for her. Before she let the tyranny of her book group dictate what she should read. Before her well-heeled friends laughed at her collection of Danielle Steel. she remembered the days when books were ice cream, not Brussels sprouts. She has since been worn down, her love of books battered by the arbiters of literary taste. But instead of merely driving her into the closet to read her romance novels in secret, it has done something far, far worse.

It has made her stop reading entirely.

This is the greatest cruelty of all. It’s one committed every day, by every parent who frowns at the child who’s got his nose deep in a Dean Koontz novel. By every bookseller who laughs at the pasty-faced men who linger near the science fiction shelves. By every highbrow twit who says to a friend, “I’d never read that trash.” Every single one of them is killing the soul of a reader. Tess Gerritsen

Love is everything it's cracked up to be. That's why people are so cynical about it. It really is worth fighting for, being brave for, risking everything for."
Erica Jong