Quotes About Reading

When we read a book, we have a blurry image that's kind of physical but blurry. But we have an emotional image also. We have an emotional connection to the character.

I asked myself what it was that I wanted from writing and where my connection with books began, and the answer to that question was definitely in childhood, because that's where my connection with reading began.

I'm entranced by the idea of reading the culture back to itself, because I'm conscious that we as people and also as a culture are myth-making machines. So I'm interested in a resistance to that: What we can bend, what we can break.

Get the screens out of your room and surround yourself with books.

I grew up in a very British family who had been transplanted to Canada, and my grandmother's house was filled with English books. I was a very early reader, so I was really brought up being surrounded with piles of British books and British newspapers, British magazines. I developed a really great love of England.

I always wanted to grow up in a house full of books, English books, and I wanted the sort of fireplaces that worked, overstuffed chairs, that whole kind of fantasy of a bookish New England life. So the library gave me that; for the hours that I was there, I was surrounded by that atmosphere that I craved in my life.

I prefer a change of surroundings anyway, and I like to be around some energy and white noise, so I usually go to a Barnes & Noble cafe or to the library on 5th and 42nd. In the afternoons, I do research, reading, editing, and play with the kids.

Forget romantic fiction, a survey has found that most women would rather read a good book than go shopping, have sex, or sleep.

Look at a book. A book is the right size to be a book. They're solar-powered. If you drop them, they keep on being a book. You can find your place in microseconds. Books are really good at being books, and no matter what happens, books will survive.

However, I survived and started to read all chemistry books that I could get a hand on, first some 19th century books from our home library that did not provide much reliable information, and then I emptied the rather extensive city library.

After Survivor, I was driving across country and moving to San Francisco, going to get a job interning at an ad agency. And then they asked me to read for this movie.

I have favorite authors from a lifetime of reading, so there are some I'll automatically read every time they have a new novel. Included in them: Robert Goddard, Jeffery Deaver, Sophie Kinsella, Katherine Neville, Greg Isle, Laurie King, Lee Child, Lisa Tucker, Susan Howatch, Paul Auster. Barry Eisler, David Hewson, Tracy Chevalier.

I'm a huge fan of Alice Hoffman, Fred Chappell and Susan Elizabeth Phillips.

I'm mostly a historical romance reader, but I never miss a Susan Elizabeth Phillips book. Her characters are larger than life and heartbreakingly real at the same time. I don't know how she does it.

I've always been curious about how much of our cultural baggage we bring to what and how we read. I suspect we bring a lot, although we like to think we don't.

The thing that makes reading and writing suspect in the eyes of the market economy is that it's not corrupted.

Some readers sort of suspect that you have another book that you didn't publish that has even more information in it. I think that readers sort of want to be taught something. They have this idea that there's a takeaway from a novel rather than just the being there, which I think is the great, great pleasure of reading.

I am a sandwich man. Somewhere early in life, my epigenetic switches got flicked to 'likes sandwiches,' and that's where they still are. I suspect it's at least in part because they're easy to eat while reading.

You sort of suspect if a book's fun to write, it will be fun to read.

The real use of imaginative reading is precisely to suspend one's mind in the workings of another sensibility.

I still read romance, and I read suspense. I read them both. And part of it is, I like stories with strong characters, and I like stories where there's closure at the end. And I like stories where there's hope. That's a kind of empowerment. I think romance novels are very empowering, and I think suspense novels are, too.

I'm a bit more of a suspense reader on the adult side, but my favorites were the ones I grew up reading.

One of my favorite authors to read is Eric Ambler, who helped pioneer the form of realistic suspense novels.

As I read, my suspicion that Jesus might really be the Messiah was confirmed.