Quotes About Reading

Pleasure reading has long been an American ideal - generations of schoolchildren have headed home for the summer toting recreational reading lists. But try to pitch it to a group of non-readers, and they quickly become suspicious.

Today we read books 'extensively,' often without sustained focus, and with rare exceptions we read each book only once. We value quantity of reading over quality of reading. We have no choice, if we want to keep up with the broader culture.

If you want to start reading Swedish crime fiction, you have to start with Sjowall and Wahloo.

I am a good boy. Sweet. I love to chill. I have a select set of friends, am big on house music, love Goa. I don't read much. Though that is one habit I am trying to inculcate.

I thought I was too intellectual to read something like 'Sweet Savage Love.'

To go back and read Swift and Defoe and Samuel Johnson and Smollett and Pope - all those people we had to read in college English courses - to read them now is to have one of the infinite pleasures in life.

I meditate - very pretentious - and I try to read as much as I can and swim at the Y.

When I found myself in the U.S., and the war was at full swing in Bosnia, I read for survival - it was a means of thought resuscitation.

I am a passionate nonfinisher. Life is too short, and there are too many great books to read, so if I lose interest or respect, I switch. But when, of course, when you really fall in love with a book, all the others are ignored.

I never read gossip press. I just read books. And I never switch on the TV anymore.

I'm reading a lot of different books, but I always think I have to switch it up a little bit. It's like food - everything in moderation, same with my books, same with my reading. You read books that are good for you and you learn a lot of stuff, then you read 'Fifty Shades of Grey,' which is like candy.

A novel ensures that we can look before and after, take action at whatever pace we choose, read again and again, skip and go back. The story in a book is humble and serviceable, available, friendly, is not switched on and off but taken up and put down, lasts a lifetime.

Because these show are live, script pages are being switched during the program and new commercial teases might be yelled in your ear with just enough time to scribble them on scrap paper before reading them.

What I want is to try and get across the idea that reading for pleasure is so beneficial. And turn children on who have maybe been switched off reading or never found a love of it in the first place.

I feel like Mills and Boon saved my life. It was a way of not living. I read a lot of other books as well, but they were definitely the best for just switching my brain off, not having to deal with reality.

I remember that feeling when I was a young reader: finding books that were set in Sydney with Australian characters was incredibly exciting.

My grandmother taught me how to read, very early, but she taught me to read just the way she taught herself how to read - she read words rather than syllables. And as a result of that, when I entered school, it took me a long time to learn how to write.

I don't even read 'the Sun' and it's my job to read everything that's politically important. I think that's a symbol of the declining power of the mainstream media.

I did an audiobook for 'Rough Crossings,' which I thought was one of the best books I had published. But it was an absolute embarrassment to read it. All these horrible mucked-up bits of syntax, over-the-top adjectives. I found myself editing it while reading. Alert listeners will notice the difference.

Reading for pleasure can easily sound like some kind of wishy-washy, soft option, while instructional stuff like learning-to-read through 'synthetic phonics' and endless worksheets requiring children to answer questions about the facts in short passages, sounds tough and purposeful.

Our scholastic system isn't structured to make sure that kids in the fifth or sixth grades absolutely know how to read.

Reading is sometimes thought of as a form of escapism, and it's a common turn of phrase to speak of getting lost in a book. But a book can also be where one finds oneself; and when a reader is grasped and held by a book, reading does not feel like an escape from life so much as it feels like an urgent, crucial dimension of life itself.

there are pleasures to be had from books beyond being lightly entertained. There is the pleasure of being challenged; the pleasure of feeling one's range and capacities expanding; the pleasure of entering into an unfamiliar world, and being led into empathy with a consciousness very different from one's own; the pleasure of knowing what others have already thought it worth knowing, and entering a larger conversation. ( The New Yorker , 13 Aug 2014)

I read the title out loud: 'A Wrinkle in Time'. And then I smiled at Richard. 'It's a first edition,' Richard said.