Quotes About Reading

[B]riefing is not reading. In fact it is the antithesis of reading. Briefing is terse, factual and to the point. Reading is untidy, discursive and perpetually inviting. Briefing closes down a subject, reading opens it up.

All reading is good reading. And all reading of Jane Austen and Charles Dickens is sublime reading.

I think the act of reading imbues the reader with a sensitivity toward the outside world that people who don't read can sometimes lack. I know it seems like a contradiction in terms; after all reading is such a solitary, internalizing act that it appears to represent a disengagement from day-to-day life. But reading, and particularly the reading of fiction, encourages us to view the world in new and challenging ways...It allows us to inhabit the consciousness of another which is a precursor to empathy, and empathy is, for me, one of the marks of a decent human being.

When you have mastered numbers, you will in fact no longer be reading numbers, any more than you read words when reading books You will be reading meanings.

I do believe that one's writing life needs to be kept separate from Po-Biz. Personally, I deal with this by not attending too many poetry readings, primarily reading dead poets or poems in translation, reading Poets & Writers only once for grant/contest information before I quickly dispose of it, and not reading Poetry Daily. Ever.

THE WRITER can get free of his writing only by using it, that is, by reading oneself. As if the aim of writing were to use what is already written as a launching pad for reading the writing to come. Moreover, what he has written is read in the process, hence constantly modified by his reading. The book is an unbearable totality. I write against a background of facets.

My rule has been, so far as I could have any rule (I could have no cast-iron rule) - my rule has been, to write what I have to say the best way I can - then lay it aside - taking it up again after some time and reading it afresh - the mind new to it. If there's no jar in the new reading, well and good - that's sufficient for me.

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.

There's something touching about a kid who's reading a book that's printed on actual paper. I think that anything that kids start reading, within reason, can lead to other discoveries.

Reading a novel after reading semiotic theory was like jogging empty-handed after jogging with hand weights. What exquisite guilt she felt, wickedly enjoying narrative! Madeleine felt safe with a nineteenth century novel. There were going to be people in it. Something was going to happen to them in a place resembling the world. Then too there were lots of weddings in Wharton and Austen. There were all kinds of irresistible gloomy men.

There is no shortage of good days. It is good lives that are hard to come by. A life of good days lived in the senses is not enough. The life of sensation is the life of greed; it requires more and more. The life of the spirit requires less and less; time is ample and its passage sweet. Who would call a day spent reading a good day? But a life spent reading -- that is a good life.

So this is supposed to be about the how, and when, and why, and what of reading -- about the way that, when reading is going well, one book leads to another and to another, a paper trail of theme and meaning; and how, when it's going badly, when books don't stick or take, when your mood and the mood of the book are fighting like cats, you'd rather do anything but attempt the next paragraph, or reread the last one for the tenth time.

If it was a biopic about Glenn Greenwald, I would have immersed myself more fully in his personal life and gotten to know him as much as I could, but because it was much more about his relationship to this particular situation, to The Guardian, to Laura Poitras, and to Ewen MacAskill, and Edward Snowden, I was able to really learn a lot about him from reading his book and reading his many articles and accounts of that time.

But with comics you're reading and assimilating an image simultaneously, instead of just reading or watching the tube

Our debt to tradition through reading and conversation is so massive, our protest so rare and insignificant-and this commonly on the ground of other reading and hearing-that in large sense, one would say there is no pure originality. All minds quote. Old and new make the warp and woof of every moment. There is no thread that is not a twist of these two strands. By necessity, by proclivity, and by delight, we all quote. It is as difficult to appropriate the thoughts of others as it is to invent.

Still in my coat and hat, I sank onto the stair to read the letter. (I never read without making sure I am in a secure position. I have been like this ever since the age of seven when, sitting on a high wall and reading The Water Babies, I was so seduced by the descriptions of underwater life that I unconsciously relaxed my muscles. Instead of being held buoyant by the water that so vividly surrounded me in my mind, I plummeted to the ground and knocked myself out. I can still feel the scar under my fringe now. Reading can be dangerous.)

A learned man is a sedentary, concentrated solitary enthusiast, who searches through books to discover some particular grain of truth upon which he has set his heart. If the passion for reading conquers him, his gains dwindle and vanish between his fingers. A reader, on the other hand, must check the desire for learning at the outset; if knowledge sticks to him well and good, but to go in pursuit of it, to read on a system, to become a specialist or an authority, is very apt to kill what suits us to consider the more humane passion for pure and disinterested reading.

It is often said that reading is a gift, but to my mind that is an insufficient description, for the size of the gift of reading is so vast that it is difficult to see what is outside its wrapping.

You can recognize in your own reading habits what writers are doing that works and what doesn't. I'm becoming much more aware of that after reading a decade of student stories.

Reading a novel, War and Peace for example, is no Catnap. Because a novel is so long, reading one is like being married forever to somebody nobody knows or cares about.

Like most uneducated Englishwomen, I like reading--I like reading books in the bulk.

When we started publishing, you had to be better than good. You had to be excellent. But as long as people are reading, I don't care what they're reading.

Read a lot. Expect something big, something exalting or deepening from a book. No book is worth reading that isn't worth re-reading.

I learned to write from reading. I had no writing classes. It's part of my thinking as the writer-author, reading, but then I also want to bring this into my characters, who also read and think. There's that great quote from Virginia Woolf - it's very simple: "...books continue each other." I think when you're a writer, you're also, hopefully, a reader, and you're bringing those earlier works into your work.

In reading a novel, any novel, we have to know perfectly well that the whole thing is nonsense, and then, while reading, believe every word of it. Finally, when we're done with it, we may find - if it's a good novel - that we're a bit different from what we were before we read it, that we have changed a little... But it's very hard to say just what we learned, how we were changed.

I do not know whether you are fond of chemical reading. There are some things in this science worth reading.

The State insists that, by thus quarantining the general reading public against books not too rugged for grown men and women in order to shield juvenile innocence, it is exercising its power to promote the general welfare. Surely this is to burn the house to roast the pig...The incidence of this enactment is to reduce the adult population of Michigan to reading only what is fit for children.

Expand the definition of 'reading' to include non-fiction, humor, graphic novels, magazines, action adventure, and, yes, even websites. It's the pleasure of reading that counts; the focus will naturally broaden. A boy won't read shark books forever.

I love short stories - reading and writing them. The best short stories distill all the potency of a novel into a small but heady draught. They are perfect reading material for the bus or train or for a lunchtime break. Everything extraneous has been strained off by the author. The best short stories pack the heft of any novel, yet resonate like poetry.

I wasn't a big comic book reader. I always had trouble knowing which box to read next. I was always reading from the wrong box. I was like, this is a comic book that doesn't make any sense! I think I was reading them all out of sequence.

Well into the 19th century there were pronouncements from just about every branch of science and medicine that reading, writing, and thinking were dangerous for women. Articles in the Lancet declared that women's brains would burst and their uteruses atrophy if they engaged in any form of rigorous thinking. The famous physician J.D. Kellogg insisted that novel reading was the greatest cause of uterine disease among young women and urged parents to protect their daughters from the dreaded consequences of print.

Reading, therefore, is a co-production between writer and reader. The simplicity of this tool is astounding. So little, yet out of it whole worlds, eras, characters, continents, people never encountered before, people you wouldn’t care to sit next to in a train, people that don’t exist, places you’ve never visited, enigmatic fates, all come to life in the mind, painted into existence by the reader’s creative powers. In this way the creativity of the writer calls up the creativity of the reader. Reading is never passive.

You see, one of the best things about reading is that you'll always have something to think about when you're not reading.

You start reading C.S. Lewis, then you’re reading G.K. Chesterton, then you’re a Catholic.

I'm steeped in the news because I enjoy the news - I like reading papers, I like reading the blogs, I love talking to newsmakers and pundits, for that matter, about their opinions. I'm an information gatherer by nature, so that's what attracted me about this industry.

If I had the opportunity to say a fine word to all the young people of America, it would be this: Don't think too much about yourselves. Try to cultivate the habit of thinking of others; this will reward you. Nourish your minds by good reading, constant reading. Discover what your lifework is, work in which you can do most good, in which you can be happiest. Be unafraid in all things when you know you are in the right.

What does it matter how cultivated and up-to-date we are, or how many thousands of books we’ve read? What matters is how we feel, how we see, what we do after reading; whether the street and the clouds and the existence of others mean anything to us; whether reading makes us, physically, more alive.

I think that my love of cooking grew out of my love of reading about cooking. When I was a kid, we had a bookcase in the kitchen filled with cookbooks. I would eat all my meals reading about meals I could have been having.

You know, this is a very strange phenomenon. I keep reading that in American newspapers, and I keep reading extensive speculations. I meet with the Chinese leaders periodically, and while I don't say they've endorsed the missile shield, it has not been in the forefront of their discussions.

If I were reading a book and happened to strike a wonderful passage I would close the book then and there and go for a walk. I hated the thought of coming to the end of a good book. I would tease it along, delay the inevitable as long as possible, But always, when I hit a great passage, I would stop reading immediately. Out I would go, rain, hail, snow or ice, and chew the cud.

Communications technology changes possibilities for communication, but that doesn't mean it changes the inherited structure of the brain. So you may think that you're addicted to online reading, but as soon as it isn't available anymore, your brain will pretty immediately adjust to other forms of reading. It's a habit like all habits.

I like reading books that provide you with knowledge that you previously didn't have. And books you have a chance to grow as a human being after reading them.

And if I really can see the future, then what does it mean? Is there any sense in our lives if everything is already out there, just waiting to happen? For if that were so, then life would be a horrible monster indeed, with no chance of escape from fate, from destiny. It would be like reading a book, but reading it backwards, from the final chapter down to chapter one, so that the end is already known to you.

Antonio- "Just in time, Pete. Five more minutes of reading this and she'd have been in a coma." Peter- "Are we such bad company that you'd rather hide out in here reading that old thing?

Film team kept me very, very shielded when I was that young, because of course, I was seven years old. You know, you're still kind of reading. It's still kind of like, "Cat." "Dog." "Ann jumped over fence." So I guess in a way it helped me progress in school, too, because I was reading so much and memorizing so much. But they kept me very shielded from everything that was going on in the The Amityville Horror. I didn't know anything, basically, about the film. I just knew that it was a scary film. I wasn't allowed to watch it. I can watch it now, I'm just too scared.

To justify being listened to, I try to be as well informed as I can. Hence, the travel. Reading is good too. Reading gets you part way there, and I do read pretty voraciously for a guy who's trying to write so much.

Reading is like looking through several windows which open to an infinite landscape....For me life without reading would be like being in prison, it would be as if my spirit were in a straightjacket; life would be a very dark and narrow place.

A woman reading Playboy feels a little like a Jew reading a Nazi manual.