C. S. Lewis on Books

"He does not despise real woods because he has read of enchanted woods: the reading makes all real woods a little enchanted."

"I wrote the books I should have liked to read. That's always been my reason for writing. People won't write the books I want, so I have to do it for myself."

"A young man who wishes to remain a sound Atheist cannot be too careful of his reading. There are traps everywhere... God is, if I may say it, very unscrupulous."

"You can't get a cup of tea large enough or a book long enough to suit me."

"I can't imagine a man really enjoying a book and reading it only once."

"Some day you will be old enough to start reading fairy tales again."

"Eating and reading are two pleasures that combine admirably."

"The doctrine of the Second Coming teaches us that we do not and cannot know when the world drama will end. The curtain may be rung down at any moment: say, before you have finished reading this paragraph."

"On recent and contemporary literature need is least and our help least. They ought to understand it better than we, and if they do not then there is something radically wrong either with them or with the literature. But I need not labour the point. There is an intrinsic absurdity in making current literature a subject of academic study, and the student who wants a tutor's assistance in reading the works of his own contemporaries might as well ask for a nurse's assistance in blowing his own nose."

"There have been men before ... who got so interested in proving the existence of God that they came to care nothing for God himself... as if the good Lord had nothing to do but to exist. There have been some who were so preoccupied with spreading Christianity that they never gave a thought to Christ."

"If you are tired of the real landscape, look at it in a mirror. By putting bread, gold, horse, apple, or the very roads into a myth, we do not retreat from reality: we rediscover it. As long as the story lingers in our mind, the real things are more themselves. This book applies the treatment not only to bread or apple but to good and evil, to our endless perils, our anguish, and our joys. By dipping them in myth we see them more clearly."

"The miracles in fact are a retelling in small letters of the very same story which is written across the whole world in letters too large for some of us to see. Of that larger script part is already visible, part is still unsolved. In other words, some of the miracles do locally what God has already done universally: others do locally what He has not yet done, but will do. In that sense, and from our human point of view, some are reminders and others prophecies."

"The First is the alter ego, the man who first reveals to you that you are not alone in the world by turning out to share all your most secret delights. There is nothing to be overcome in making him your friend; he and you join like raindrops on a window. But the Second Friend is the man who disagrees with you about everything... Of course he shares your interests; otherwise he would not become your friend at all. But he has approached them all at a different angle. he has read all the right books but has got the wrong thing out of every one... How can he be so nearly right, and yet, invariably, just not right? He is as fascinating as a woman."