The reason a writer writes a book is to forget a book and the reason a reader reads one is to remember it.

Thomas Wolfe
About This Quote

The reason a writer writes a book is to forget a book and the reason a reader reads one is to remember it. In essence, this means that our memories are unreliable. If we write down a story, we tend to remember it quite vividly. It’s been said that when you read a book, you only know the first half of what was written.

When you read a book again, you might not remember the second half. That’s why it’s so important to write a book and read a book. Both help us forget the other.

Some Similar Quotes
  1. A half-read book is a half-finished love affair. - David Mitchell

  2. If one wanted to depict the whole thing graphically, every episode, with its climax, would require a three-dimensional, or, rather, no model: every experience is unrepeatable. What makes lovemaking and reading resemble each other most is that within both of them times and spaces open,... - Italo Calvino

  3. We shouldn't teach great books we should teach a love of reading. Knowing the contents of a few works of literature is a trivial achievement. Being inclined to go on reading is a great achievement. - B.F. Skinner

  4. Do not read, as children do, to amuse yourself, or like the ambitious, for the purpose of instruction. No, read in order to live. - Gustave Flaubert

  5. People say that life is the thing, but I prefer reading. - Logan Pearsall Smith

More Quotes By Thomas Wolfe
  1. You can't go home again

  2. I believe that we are lost here in America, but I believe we shall be found. And this belief, which mounts now to the catharsis of knowledge and conviction, is for me--and I think for all of us--not only our own hope, but America's everlasting,...

  3. Something has spoken to me in the night...and told me that I shall die, I know not where. Saying: "[Death is] to lose the earth you know for greater knowing; to lose the life you have, for greater life; to leave the friends you loved,...

  4. What I had to face, the very bitter lesson that everyone who wants to write has got to learn, was that a thing may in itself be the finest piece of writing one has ever done, and yet have absolutely no place in the manuscript...

  5. The thought of these vast stacks of books would drive him mad: the more he read, the less he seemed to know – the greater the number of the books he read, the greater the immense uncountable number of those which he could never read...

Related Topics