Andy Miller Quotes & Sayings

I wanted to possess all the books I had already read, as well as all those I had not - every book in the whole wide world, in other words. — Andy Miller

When we find a painting or a novel or a musical we love, we are briefly connected to the best that human beings are capable of, in ourselves and others, and we are reminded that our path through the world must intersect with others. Whether we like it or not, we are not alone. — Andy Miller

However, although The Da Vinci Code did a whole heap of things defectively, it did one thing stupefyingly well - the plot. It was as though Brown had jettisoned all traces of style and credibility from his novel because he had realised, in a flash of Leonardo-like scientific insight, that style and credibility were the very properties preventing his theoretical story-balloon from taking flight. So they had been tossed over the side, along with beauty, truth and five hundred years of literary progress. — Andy Miller

It occurred to me that I had been extraordinarily fortunate to have grown up in a prosperous country in an era when, for pretty much the first time in its history, I could read whatever I wanted, whenever I wanted to. And what had I done with this freedom? I had slowly, though unintentionally, abused it. My reading life had become an accumulation of bad habits, short cuts and lies. — Andy Miller

Is it wrong to prefer books to people? Not at Christmas. A book is like a guest you have invited into your home, except you don't have to play Pictionary with it or supply it with biscuits and stollen. — Andy Miller

I felt the unmistakable certainty that I had been in the presence of great art, and that my heart had opened in reply. — Andy Miller

How I loved the municipal libraries of South Croydon. They were not child-friendly places; in fact, they were not friendly at all, to anyone. They were large, dark, wood-panelled rooms full of books, in which visitors were expected to be silent, and the only sound was the clicking of school shoes on polished parquet floor. The larger building in the town had its own children's library, accessible at one end of the hall via an imposing door, but what lay behind that door was not a children's library as we might understand it today, full of scatter cushions and toys and strategies of appeasement; it revealed simply a smaller, replica wood-panelled room full of books. And this - the shared expectation of respect, the solemnity, the shelves crammed end-to-end with books, no face-outs or yawning gaps - is what I loved about these places and what I found inspiring. The balance of power lay with the books, not the public. This would never be permitted today. — Andy Miller

The thing that chiefly struck me was the rarity of really bookish people. — Andy Miller

I long to reach my home and see the day of my return. It is my never-failing wish.' Homer, The Odyssey — Andy Miller

Moby-Dick is a long, grueling, convoluted graft. And yet, as soon as I completed it, once I could hold it at arm's length and admire its intricacy and design, I knew Moby-Dick was obviously, uncannily, a masterwork. It wormed into my subconsious; I dreamed about it for nights afterwards. Whereas when I finished The Da Vinci Code, which had taken little less than twelve hours from cover to cover, I chicked it aside and thought: wow - I really ought to read something good. — Andy Miller

As a parent, it has been instructive to discover that the deep, instinctive love I feel for my own child is counterbalanced by the antipathy I feel towards other people's children. — Andy Miller

On average, everyone has read The Da Vinci Code. You have probably read it. Even if you have not read it, statistically you have. — Andy Miller

Reading is a broad church. But it is still a church. — Andy Miller

Somebody once described the Internet as a library where all the books have been taken off the shelves and dumped in the middle of the floor. Disorganisation, however, is not the issue. The Internet is the greatest library in the universe; unfortunately someone has removed all the 'no talking' signs. — Andy Miller

As Schopenhauer noted a hundred and fifty years ago, 'It would be a good thing to buy books if one could also buy the time to read them; but one usually confuses the purchase of books with the acquisition of their contents. — Andy Miller

if you like reading, this is the object, unbeknownst to you, you have been waiting for; but if you love reading as I do, you may struggle to comprehend what all the fuss is about. Did it make reading better? Of course not. It's a useful addition to our library, not a replacement for it. I take the Kindle with me wherever I go. But I also take a good book. — Andy Miller

...It's [kindle] a useful addition to our library, not a replacement for it. — Andy Miller

In the midst of nature's savagery, human beings sometimes (rarely) succeed in creating small oases warmed by love. Small, exclusive, enclosed spaces governed only by love and shared subjectivity. — Andy Miller

We are creatures made as much by art as by experience and what we read in books is the sum of both. — Andy Miller

All these sorts of book feature in The Year of Reading Dangerously, which could yet be called Fifty Shades of Great. — Andy Miller

In short, this was a period in which the phrase 'you're never alone with a good book' started to sound less like a promise and more like a threat. — Andy Miller

That's the trouble with stereotypes: they are not wholly disconnected from the truth. — Andy Miller

I don't know if you have ever tried to read Moby-Dick on a DS in a Tesco car park - I doubt you have - but I cannot recommend it. The two miniature screens, so in harmony with the escapades of Super Mario and Lego Batman, do not lend themselves to the study of this arcane, eldritch text; and nor does the constant clamor of a small boy in the back seat asking when he can have his DS back. — Andy Miller

We live in an era where opinion is currency. The pressure is on us to say 'I like this' or 'I don't like that', to make snap decisions and stick them on our credit cards. But when faced with something we cannot comprehend at once, which was never intended to be snapped up or whizzed through, perhaps 'I don't like it' is an inadequate response. Don't like Middlemarch? It doesn't matter. It was here before we arrived, and will be here long after we have gone. Instead, perhaps we should have the humility to say: I didn't get it. I need to try harder. — Andy Miller

Did I really read every single book in the school? My mother maintains I did. Maybe I just told the teachers I had and they all believed me. Maybe this is where the lying about books really began. Where were the checks and balances? I blame the authorities. — Andy Miller