Quotes About Reading

How precious a book is in light of the offering, in the light of the one who has the privilege of this offering. The library tells you of this offering.

I don't really read a lot. I got a few Booker Prize books and some others and thought I'd try this but quite quickly I just stick them down. I do like some Stephen King books but with some of them I just put them down as well. But I'm like that with telly stuff as well and films or music.

I'm aware families sit around the telly to watch 'Vera', which is making entertainment out of murder. But I don't enjoy reading about people's pain. I tend to put myself in that position, and it's not somewhere I want to be.

Every time we pick up a book from a sense of duty and we find that we're struggling to get through it, we reinforce the notion that reading is something we should do, but telly is something that we want to do.

I don't believe that a writer does something wonderful spontaneously. I believe it's the result of years of living, of study, reading, his very personality and temperament. At one particular moment, all these come together and the artist 'expresses' himself.

Even as a young child, I was a lover of books and of the spaces in which, as indeed in a sacred temple, books might safely reside.

Where you read a book and when and with whom can make a big difference.

Where you read a book and when you read and with whom (as your fellow readers) can make a big difference!

Constructing a good reading list involves not so much matching student interest with author's subject matter . . . as considering the degree of moral engagement a particular text seems able to make with any number of readers.

read to each other from novels by George Eliot and Dickens and Hardy and Tolstoy during my elementary school years. My brother Bill (now a professor of English)

She like history . . . and wished the English teacher would ask the class to read history books. Instead the teacher was 'always' assigning poems.

How do those people who don't read books plug the gaps in their day? The journeys, the break-times, the evenings when the telly is crap, the time in bed before sleep arrives?

Suddenly the whole imagination of writing and editorial and newspaper and all these presumptions about who am I reading this, and who else other people may be, and all that, it's so grimly brutal!

Like serious reading itself, travel has now become an act of resistance against the distractions of the electronic age, and against all the worries that weigh us down, thanks to that age. A good book deserves to be finished, just as a haunting landscape tempts further experience of it, and further research into it. Travel and serious reading, because they demand sustained focus, stand athwart the nonexistent attention spans that deface our current time on Earth.

I was cooped up on a Wednesday night, reading The Nightingale, a book that had transported me back to 1940s Paris, when Nazis goose-stepped down the Avenue des Champs-Élysées. I heard someone at the door.

love the life of the mind, and I've spent my whole life studying and reading. Yet because of where we are now, the 'true' and the 'good' are offensive in a culture that is so radically subjective and relativist, and the minute you say, 'Hey, I've got the truth for you,' every defense goes up, and even more if you say, 'I've got what's good for you.

I can say with confidence that no man, however mature, ever loved reading for its own sake more than I. I did not read because of any particular urge for learning, or to merely pass the time, or to escape the realities of life. I read simply because I loved reading for its own sake alone. The printed page was like wine to me."—Robert E. Howard (from One Who Walked Alone by Novalyne Price Ellis)

Read history, works of truth, not novels and romances

The whole world's writing novels, but nobody's reading them.

The whole world's writing novels, but nobody's reading them. We need readers. More readers. Fewer writers.

Memories like shrapnel, forever embedded, infected by what had come later…words of love and undying devotion, times of sublime happiness, lies upon lies upon lies…his attention kept sliding away from the stories he was reading.

The detective seemed to remember reading that advertisers used Scottish accents to suggest integrity and honesty. The

but we don't know whether the killer writes." "Oh, nearly everyone does these days," said Fancourt. "The whole world's writing novels, but nobody's reading them.

There he sits a whole afternoon sometimes, reading of these same abominable, vile, (a pox on them, I cannot abide them!) rascally verses. Ben Jonson, Every Man in His Humour