Quotes About Reading

You devour a book meant to be read, not because you would fill yourself or have an anxious care to be nourished, but because it contains such stuff as it makes the mind hungry to look upon. Neither do you read it to kill time, but to lengthen time, rather, adding to its natural usury by living the more abundantly while it lasts, joining another's life and thought to your own.

No, no, I'm a lowbrow. I read [Dostoevsky] more out of obligation than enjoyment. For enjoyment, for me, it's a beer and the football game.

OUT TODAY — THE NEW POCKET BOOK THAT MAY REVOLUTIONIZE AMERICA'S READING HABITS' (from a 1939 Pocket Book advertisement)

Use the money for fashion to get books.

When I 'bout 17 I left Kentucky and goes to Indiana and white folks sends me to school to larn readin' and writin', but I got tired of dat and run off and jine de army. Dat in 1876 and dey sends me to Arizona.

To read is to translate, for no two persons' experiences are the same. A bad reader is like a bad translator: he interprets literally when he ought to paraphrase and paraphrases when he ought to interpret literally.

I was in a vicious cycle: writing and reading seemed to be the only way to beat back the loneliness, but they also reinforced it

Few people here have any need of novels

I couldn't possibly say," he said. "If you read a novel to the end, then it's over. I would never want to do something as wasteful as that. I'd much rather keep it here with me, safe and sound, forever.

he has never read a single page of any of my books. Once, when I told him I'd love to know what he thinks of them, he demurred. "I couldn't possibly say," he said. "If you read a novel to the end, then it's over. I would never want to do something as wasteful as that. I'd much rather keep it here with me, safe and sound, forever.

If you read a novel to the end, then it's over. I would never want to do something as wasteful as that. I'd much rather keep it here with me, safe and sound, forever.

A half-read book is a half-finished love affair.

Where did you learn that?" Vein asked, still staring. "I read," Bruno said evenly. "I talk less than the rest of you. It gives me time.

Well, in the first flush of love, if someone tells you to read something then you damn well read it [...]

Brian: I love books Prof. Morrison: The contents of books, or just owning a whole load of books?

There seemed no reason why she shouldn't try writing something in between, but she was discovering once again that reading and writing were not the same - you couldn't just soak it up and then squeeze it out again.

He swatted at her with his book. "Shut up and read, will you?" He lay back down and closed his eyes. Emma glanced over to check that he was smiling, and smiled too.

People often ask, why aren't you reading about what it is you're working on right now? And the truth is, you only get three pages a night before your eyelids close.

Printed books are dirt cheap, never run out of power and survive drops, spills and being run over. And their file format will still be readable 200 years from now.

She's reading a thriller by David Rosenfelt, one of the great writers of our time,

His chosen medium—writing—had, he believed, a high potential for holding America together. America was a nation of readers, known worldwide for its high literacy rates. At midcentury, a full 90 percent of white American adults could read, as opposed to about 60 percent in England. Whitman crowed hyperbolically: "In regard to intelligence, education, knowledge, the masses of [English] people, in comparison with the masses of the U.S., are at least two hundred years behind us.

The only end of writing is to enable the reader better to enjoy life, or better to endure it"—

Soon they would spend all day there, locked up inside the truck, reading undisturbed. There were no windows but there were thousands of windows, in every book on every shelf.

I don't read novels whilst I'm writing one; I just haven't got a wide enough brain to concentrate on incoming and outgoing in the same time zone.