Quotes About Reading

I'm not really a book person, to be honest.

I have the Sony Reader; I have the Kindle as well. I don't really use either of them, to be honest. I'd rather sit down with a cup of coffee and a newspaper than read all my digital books.

I like books. I read a lot, to be honest.

To be honest, and this is terrible to admit, I hardly read any teen mystery books at all.

I'm not that big of a reader, to be honest.

I'm an appreciator. I love all kinds of books, and I want others to love them, too.

Perhaps it is partly that we need to love books ourselves as parents, grandparents and teachers in order to pass on that passion for stories to our children. It's not about testing and reading schemes, but about loving stories and passing on that passion to our children.

The books I used to love as a kid, I used to read football books - and by that I mean soccer books - stories about boys in school who started to play football and then became the captain. I'd read them cover to cover. I just got lost in them.

Anyone who wants bookstores to survive is portrayed as a Luddite who goes around smashing up Kindles.

Any independent bookstore that has managed to survive is the best place to do a reading.

The Toast's audience is about 30-35 percent male, which shocked me because I would say that we actively try to discourage men from reading our site. Apparently, there's not insignificant number of dudes out there who think that what we are doing is okay.

The future of reading is screens. Books are toast.

Pretty much every night of their lives, my 8-year-old sons have absorbed themselves entirely in books. As toddlers, they pointed out pictures, made conjectures; lately, we find them in their bunk beds embarked upon two-hour comic-reading benders.

Sooner or later, all magazines end up in the toilet.

But Italy is not an intellectual country. On the subway in Tokyo everybody reads. In Italy, they don't. Don't evaluate Italy from the fact that it produced Raphael and Michelangelo.

My parents tolerated me reading comics because they knew I was also reading 'proper' books, too.

'The Hobbit' by J. R. R. Tolkien was the first book I enjoyed. I was 14 and when I finished I started it again.

Just think about it: in every shop in the reading world since 1956, there has been two feet of book-space devoted to Tolkien.

Before my teens, my contemporaries were reading Tolkien and were absorbed by his works, but try as I might, I could not be drawn in, perhaps as something in me resists the epic, medieval-feeling fantasy.

I'm most impressed by the Russian writers, so I love reading the works of Tolstoy and Dostoyevsky. Another author who has informed the way I think is the French philosopher, Blaise Pascal.

Really important books to me are the classics. I try very hard to read them well - you know, especially once I got serious about writing. So, reading Tolstoy several times - 'War and Peace,' 'The Kreutzer Sonata' - all those were really important to me.

I've read probably 25 or 30 books by Balzac, all of Tolstoy - the novels and letters - and all of Dickens. I learned my craft from these guys.

I survived many a youth hostel bunk room reading Tolstoy by flashlight.

'Macbeth' was the first play I ever read. In fact, I remember my brother Tom, who is six years older than me, coming home from school and telling me about it. He was the one that really got me going.