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Arnold Bennett Quotes about Reading

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I know people who read and read, and for all the good it does them, they might as well cut bread and butter. Unless you give at least 45 minutes of careful, fatiguing reflection upon what you are reading, your minutes

I know people who read and read, and for all the good it does them, they might as well cut bread and butter. Unless you give at least 45 minutes of careful, fatiguing reflection upon what you are reading, your minutes are chiefly wasted.

Arnold Bennett
Reading, Cutting, Reflection

The second suggestion is to think as well as to read. I know people who read and read, and for all the good it does them they might just as well cut bread-and-butter. They take to reading as better men take to drink. They fly through the shires of literature on a motor-car, their sole object being motion. They will tell you how many books they have read in a year. Unless you give at least 45 minutes to careful, fatiguing reflection (it is an awful bore at first) upon what you are reading, your 90 minutes of a night are chiefly wasted.

Arnold Bennett
Book, Reading, Cutting
Arnold Bennett (2013). “How To Live On Twenty-Four Hours A Day”, p.40, Read Books Ltd

Essential characteristic of the really great novelist: a Christ-like, all-embracing compassion.

Arnold Bennett
Art, Book, Reading
1896 Journal entry,15 Oct.

Nearly all bookish people are snobs, and especially the more enlightened among them. They are apt to assume that if a writer has immense circulation, if he is enjoyed by plain persons, and if he can fill several theatres at once, he cannont possibly be worth reading and merits only indifference and disdain.

Arnold Bennett
Reading, People, Theatre
Arnold Bennett (1974). “Arnold Bennett: the Evening standard years: "Books and persons" 1926-1931”, Shoe String Pr Inc

Does there, I wonder, exist a being who has read all, or approximately all, that the person of average culture is supposed to have read, and that not to have read is a social sin? If such a being does exist, surely he is an old, a very old man.

Arnold Bennett
Funny, Book, Reading
Arnold Bennett (1932). “The Journals of Arnold Bennett ...: 1896-1910”, London, Cassell

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