Robertson Davies on Books

"You would not serve junk food at a banquet, and your book must be a banquet. Get your language from Swift, not from Shopsy's."

"This is, after all, a book about reading, and the kind of reader I am addressing does not care primarily about being in fashion."

"One receives the impression from his writings that he made it his plan to read any book whatever that no one else can bear to read."

"If you can, and if you are a playgoer and a filmgoer, you should be able to find voices for all the characters in the books you read."

"We all have slumbering realms of sensibility which can be coaxed into wakefulness by books."

"A Library goes on as far as thought can reach."

"Foolish people laugh at those readers a century ago who wept over the novels of Dickens. Is it a sign of superior intellect to read anything and everything unmoved, in a grey, unfeeling Limbo?"

"Books of the avant-garde either establish themselves as books of lasting value, or they slip from the rear guard into the discard, and I believe the writers I mentioned have not proven trivial."

"There are, one presumes, tone-deaf readers."

"Do not suppose, however, that I intend to urge a diet of classics on anybody. I have seen such diets at work. I have known people who have actually read all, or almost all, the guaranteed Hundred Best Books. God save us from reading nothing but the best."

"And how often do we meet the man who prefaces his remarks with: "I was reading a book last night..." in the too loud, overenunciated fashion of one who might be saying: "I keep a hippogryph in my basement." Reading confers status."

"I was reading Dorothy Dix this afternoon; she says that it is permissible for a young man to tell a girl he knows fairly well that she has pretty ankles; from this I assume that the better he knows her the higher he may praise her."

"The first week of this month was International Cat Week, and as the cat is, above all animals, the writer's pet, I suppose I should have written something about it. But I do not care about "weeks", and every week is a cat week with me."

"There are great numbers of people to whom the act of reading a book — any sort of book — is wondrous; they speak of the reader in the tone of warm approbation which they use otherwise when referring to pregnant women, or the newly dead."

"The devil gave me a look which made me profoundly uneasy. 'Just because I am enjoying your sympathy, don't imagine that I cannot read you like a book,' he said. 'You think you are cleverer than I; it is a very common academic delusion.'"

"An important aspect of Nonconformity was its cult of the Bible as the fount of all wisdom. But the Bible takes much of its colour from whoever is reading it, and it provides a text to support almost every shade of opinion, however preposterous."

"So, I was to talk about "Opera as Related to Literature", was I not? And because the subject is so vast, I have wandered here and there, trying to illuminate, as if with a candle, a vast chamber full of fascinating corners, mysterious with mirrors, and echoing with some of the loveliest music ever written. I have not succeeded on any high level, but then, I never expected to do so. But perhaps I have thrown out an idea or two which you would like to consider for yourselves."

"There is no reason to suppose that people today feel less than their grandfathers, but there is good reason to think that they are less able to read in a way which makes them feel. It is natural for them to blame books rather than themselves, and to demand fiction which is highly peppered, like a glutton whose palate is defective."

"Readers will immediately divine that this was written before the advent of the credit card. After this invention grasped commerce in its clutch, Marchbanks found that unless he had one he was without Fiscal Credibility; if he had no debts he did not exist. Modern man is a debtor, or he is nothing, and money becomes more and more illusory."

"Strange reading? It is meant to be. The world is full of romantic, macabre, improbable things which would never do in works of fiction. When those that come within one man's notice are gathered together in a scrapbook, they tell of a world which sobersided folk may not choose to recognize as their own. But it is their own; I have the evidence."

"But in their second-best rank, books of this academic sort are, of all books, the easiest to write. They chew over what has already been well chewed; they grapple with other scholars, seeking to bear them down into the academic ooze; they explore the vast caverns of the creator's spirit with no illumination save the smoky and fitful rushlight of their own critical intelligence."