Quotes About Reading

Americans will listen, but they do not care to read. War and Peace must wait for the leisure of retirement, which never really comes: meanwhile it helps to furnish the living room. Blockbusting fiction is bought as furniture. Unread, it maintains its value. Read, it looks like money wasted. Cunningly, Americans know that books contain a person, and they want the person, not the book.

The possession of a book becomes a substitute for reading it.

I know why those librarians read the old stories to you," Rex says. "Because if it's told well enough, for as long as the story lasts, you get to slip the trap.

it is splendid to drowse on the davenport, to be warm and fed, to feel the sentences hoist her up and carry her somewhere else.

What it would be like to spend ten years in this tall narrow house, shuttered from the world, studying its secrets and reading its volumes and looking at this girl.

All day Marie-Laure lies on her stomach and reads. Logic, reason, pure science: these, Aronnax insists, are the proper ways to pursue a mystery. Not fables and fairy tales.

Sometimes I understood what a word meant from reading but had never met it in life.

For most people bedtime was early, although Cicero admitted to writing speeches or books and reading papers at night (there was a Latin word for it, lucubrare—to work by lamplight).

There were books everywhere, hundreds of them on shelves that had been designed to fit into every nook and cranny, and it goes without saying that anyone who collects books can't be all bad.

You must know that feeling when it's raining outside and the heating's on and you lose yourself, utterly, in a book.

This was a woman who didn't just go to bed with a book. She went to bed with a library.

Books grow old faster when they're not being read

ABSOLUTELY WONDERFUL! I wish they'd had books like this when I was young…

You must know that feeling when it's raining outside and the heating's on and you lose yourself, utterly, in a book. You read and you read and you feel the pages slipping through your fingers until suddenly there are fewer in your right hand than there are in your left and you want to slow down but you still hurtle on towards a conclusion you can hardly bear to discover.

I hadn't liked him the day I'd met him although the strange thing is that I'd always loved his books.

You must know that feeling when it's raining outside and the heating's on and you lose yourself, utterly, in a book. You read and you read and you feel the pages slipping through your fingers until suddenly there are fewer in your right hand than there are in your left and you want to slow down but you still hurtle on towards a conclusion you can hardly bear to discover.

I like reading novels because it provides insight into human behavior.

It might be an idea for all literary critics to read the books they analyse aloud - it certainly helps to fix them in the mind, while providing a readymade seminar with your audience.

My favorite thing is to hang out at my house, be on my beautiful property, prune bushes, take a long walk, build a fire, and read.

I buy so much when I go through airports: I buy psychology magazines; I buy 'Mind,' another magazine, 'New Scientist,' 'Scientific America.'

Every day, no matter how tired my father was, he'd put me in the car and drive me to Schaumburg Public Library, and he'd read to me from books about Dr. King, Mahatma Gandhi, Eleanor Roosevelt.

One of the reasons that I take such joy in being a trustee of the New York Public Library is the love of reading that I found as a child in the Saturday morning library events for preschoolers and first and second graders as I was growing up in Augusta, GA.

I didn't belong to the sort of family where the children's classics were laid on. I went to the public library and read everything I could get my hands on.

I feel lucky that I get to read and publish stories that are not necessarily overtly horror in 'Best Horror of the Year.'