Daily Inspiration Quote by Reynolds Price

A novelist admitting he no longer returns to novels and poems sounds like heresy, which is exactly why Reynolds Price’s line lands. It punctures the romantic notion that writers live in a constant loop of literary worship, endlessly rereading the canon and chasing the new. Price frames the shift as an almost bodily fact of aging: “the older I’ve got” makes the change feel less like a choice than a recalibration of appetite. The doubled hedge - “going back and re-reading or really reading new” - suggests not just less leisure, but less tolerance for the particular kind of attention fiction and poetry demand: slow, immersive, and emotionally porous.

The subtext is pragmatic and a little severe. As time shortens, so does patience for art that requires surrender. Price isn’t confessing ignorance; he’s implying saturation. A life spent inside narrative can create a private library in the mind, a store of patterns, voices, and scenes that makes further intake feel redundant. There’s also the quiet possibility of professional exhaustion: when your job is to make sentences, reading other people’s sentences can start to feel like shop talk.

Context matters. Price wrote out of the late-20th-century American literary world, a culture that often treats “serious reading” as moral proof. His candor resists that piety. It also hints at a writer turning toward other forms of meaning - memoir, history, scripture, letters, the lived texture of days - genres that promise direct contact rather than invented experience. The line’s power is its refusal to perform literary devotion; it makes aging not an aesthetic decline, but a ruthless edit of what still feels necessary.