Things I learned on the 6 Quotes

“You get to sit by yourself, listen to music and read a book. It must be heaven.”
― Stig Abell, What to read next. How to make books part of your life.

“reading for me is one of the central facets of existence. I cannot spend a day without a book. I have – in common with everybody – regular moments of mental unrest, roiling disquiet, uncertainty and anxiety. I manage them with a sedative, an analgesic: the escape into worlds created by other people. The invention of the novel, it seems to me, is one of the true triumphs of human endeavour. It codifies something magnificent within all of us: the act of empathy. When we read, we forge a connection with an author, and often then a common culture or tradition that is greater than us. Reading is an act of enlarging, of expansion. It makes our ‘I’ bigger than just ourselves; it stretches our sense of identity and experience.”
― Stig Abell, What to read next. How to make books part of your life.

“Mark Twain said, supposedly: a classic book is something that everybody wants to have read but nobody wants to read.”
― Stig Abell, Things I learned on the 6:28: A Commuter's Guide to Reading

“That is the problem[,] it seems to me[,] with self-consciously ‘literary’ fiction: it values difficulty as a quality, where it is really a disadvantage. What I call the ‘eat your vegetables’ approach to writing, publishing and criticism: yes, the prose is hard to get through, but you’ll feel the benefits later. Fiction should never be merely fibrous. Greatness, it seems to me, is always readily accessible to the mind.”
― Stig Abell, Things I learned on the 6:28: A Commuter's Guide to Reading