Sven Birkerts

I read books to read myself.

— Sven Birkerts

Poetry springs directly from our primal need and capacity for communication[Poetry] mobilizes such a concentration of devices, such an intensification of language…

— Sven Birkerts

“It is in adolescence that most of us grasp that life--our own life--is a problem to be solved, that a set of…

— Sven Birkerts

“What reading does...is keep alive the dangerous and exhilarating idea that life is not sequenced of lived moments, but a destiny.”

— Sven Birkerts

I speak as an unregenerate reader, one who still believes that language and not technology is the true evolutionary miracle. I have…

— Sven Birkerts

Every place, once unique, itself, is strangely shot through with radiations from every other place. ‘There’ was then; ‘here’ is now.

— Sven Birkerts

To achieve deep focus nowadays is also to have struck a blow against the dissipation of self; it is to have strengthened…

— Sven Birkerts

Reading, because we control it, is adaptable to our needs and rhythms. We are free to indulge our subjective associative impulse; the…

— Sven Birkerts

Where am I when I am involved in a book?

— Sven Birkerts

“Everything in contemporary society discourages interiority. More and more of our exchanges take place via circuits, and in their very nature those…

— Sven Birkerts

A poem is a construction of inner space. Language is to inner space as light is to material space.

— Sven Birkerts

What reading does, ultimately, is keep alive the dangerous and exhilarating idea that life is not a sequence of lived moments, but…

— Sven Birkerts

“I read novels to indulge in a concentrated and directed inner activity that parallels -- and thereby tunes up, accentuates -- my…

— Sven Birkerts

If literature survives at all, it is as retreat for those who refuse to assimilate to American mass culture.

— Sven Birkerts

The books that matter to me...are those that galvanize something inside me. I read books to read myself.

— Sven Birkerts

“What reading does, ultimately, is keep alive the dangerous and exhilarating idea that a life is not a sequence of lived moments,…

— Sven Birkerts

“...a novel for me is a pretext, a way of starting up and sustaining a complicated and many layered inner exchange, a…

— Sven Birkerts

“We never know, do we, if the future is just more of the present pushed forward, or whether the look and feel,…

— Sven Birkerts

Language is the soul’s ozone layer and we thin it at our peril.

— Sven Birkerts

“I often find that a novel, even a well-written and compelling novel, can become a blur to me soon after I've finished…

— Sven Birkerts

A book is solitude, privacy; it is a way of holding the self apart from the crush of the outer world.

— Sven Birkerts

If anything has changed about my reading over the years, it is that I value the state a book puts me in…

— Sven Birkerts

“To read, when one does so of one's own free will, is to make a volitional statement, to cast a vote; it…

— Sven Birkerts