Quotes About Reading

There is something about the medium [in comics] that allows for a simulation of actual experience with the added benefit of actually reading. You're reading pictures, but you are also looking at them. It's a sort of combined activity that I can't really think of any other medium having, other than, say, a foreign film when you are reading and seeing. It allows for all sorts of associations that might not come up with just words or just pictures.

I had hundreds of books under my skin already. Not selected reading, all of it. Some of it could be called trashy. I had been through Nick Carter, Horatio Alger, Bertha M. Clay and the whole slew of dime novelists in addition to some really constructive reading. I do not regret the trash. It has harmed me in no way. It was a help, because acquiring the reading habit early is the important thing. Taste and natural development will take care of the rest later on.

I grew up poor in crappy situations various crappy situations. What kept me sane was reading and music. I had so many different literary tastes growing up, be it fiction like Stephen King or Piers Anthony or non-fiction like reading Hunter S. Thompson essays or reading the Beats. I was a huge fan of the Beat movement.

As for the differences between audio and the printed page, the sonic aspects of poetry are important to me. I read my poems aloud to myself as I'm composing them. And I enjoy reading to an audience. I think people get tone more easily when they hear a writer read her work. Some people have told me they hear more humor in my poems at a live reading than when they see them on the page. I think that may be a matter of pacing. On the other hand, I've listened to a lot of poetry readings and I know how much you can miss. If you stop to really register one line, you miss the next three or so.

It distresses me that parents insist that their children read or make them read. I think the best way for children to treasure reading is for them to see the adults in their lives reading for their own pleasure.

The words of the Constitution... are so unrestricted by their intrinsic meaning or by their history or by tradition or by prior decisions that they leave the individual Justice free, if indeed they do not compel him, to gather meaning not from reading the Constitution but from reading life.

Reading a hard copy book, and reading a book on an iPad are slightly different experiences. What they both have in common though is that you must engage your imagination in the process.

The prefect evening...lying down on the couch beside the bookcase and reading himself sleepy...Jim lying opposite him at the other end of the couch, also reading; the two of them absorbed in their books yet so completely aware of each other's presence.

If I'm reading something I happen to know and gets it wrong, I just don't trust the book any more. What I ask of a novel I'm reading is that it should know a fraction more about the things I know than I do. When I'm writing...I ask myself: would I be convinced by this if I read it? If I knocked against this bit of scenery, would it feel solid?

You don't have to care about children to care about children. One of the things that I talk a lot about is the fact of the importance of third-grade reading level. By the end of third grade, if the child is not at reading level, it'll drop off. They never catch up.

Words are alive--when I've found a story that I love, I read it again and again, like playing a favorite song over and over. Reading isn't passive--I enter the story with the characters, breathe their air, feel their frustrations, scream at them to stop when they're about to do something stupid, cry with them, laugh with them. Reading for me, is spending time with a friend. A book is a friend. You can never have too many.

No fiction is worth reading except for entertainment. If it entertains and is clean, it is good literature, or its kind. If it forms the habit of reading, in people who might not read otherwise, it is the best literature.

Reading, reading actively, strengthens the soul.

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.

The art of injudicious reading, the art of miscellaneous reading which every normal man ought to cultivate, is a very fine and satisfactory art; for the best guide to books is a book itself. It clasps hands with a thousand other books.

The only thing worse than not reading a book in the last ninety days is not reading a book in the last ninety days and thinking that it doesn't matter

Jeff Chu's pilgrimage across America to discover his own place as a gay man in the Christian church as well as attitudes about being gay and Christian across denominations is at once timely, smart, poignant, disturbing, inspiring, and maddening. It's essential reading for anyone who cares about the rights of the LGBTQ community to be treated as equal citizens at every level, including the religious-which means it should be essential reading for everybody.

I do think that the imagination you create yourself when you're reading, to create the tone and the accent of the world, is an individual accomplishment that someone is imposing upon you by listening to them read it. Because you're listening to their interpretation, and their emphasis would probably be different from the one that your brain makes while you're reading it.

Reading is always a way of forming a bond with other people. I'm not very good at socializing - I quite like spending time alone - so reading is a way of engaging quite deeply with the way other people think. Quite often when you meet other people socially you don't get to have a conversation of any depth. You end up talking about how well or how badly someone is doing at school or something of that sort. Questions like, "What we are," "Who we are," "Where are we going," you get those from literature and from people that spend some time thinking.

As in the sexual experience, there are never more than two persons present in the act of reading-the writer, who is the impregnator, and the reader, who is the resspondent. This gives the experience of reading a sublimity and power unequalled by any other form of communication.

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.

Hard work makes easy reading or, at least, easier reading.

I'm kind of a nerd when it comes to literature and theory. I wish I could have more of that in life, but I don't because I'm always reading scripts or things to prepare for movies when I'm reading.

Gardening is really an extended form of reading, of history and philosophy. The garden itself has become like writing a book. I walk around and walk around. Apparently people often see me standing there and they wave to me and I don't see them because I am reading the landscape.

A friend once told me that the real message Bram Stoker sought to convey in 'Dracula' is that a human being needs to live hundreds and hundreds of years to get all his reading done; that Count Dracula, basically nothing more than a misunderstood bookworm, was draining blood from the necks of 10,000 hapless virgins not because he was the apotheosis of pure evil but because it was the only way he could live long enough to polish off his extensive reading list. But I have no way of knowing if this is true, as I have not yet found time to read 'Dracula.

The magic of comics is that there are three people involved in any comic: There is whoever is writing it, and whoever is drawing it, and then there's whoever is reading it, because the really important things in comics are occurring in the panel gutters, they're occurring between panels as the person reading the comics is moving you through, is creating a film in their heads.

Support your public library! It is a treasure and a legacy that will provide entertainment, information, a sense of community, and real continuity from one generation to the next, and the next after that. So long as we keep reading, and reading to our children, there will be hope for our shared cultural heritage and the future of our world.

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

The diligent reading of Sacred Scripture accompanied by prayer brings about that intimate dialogue in which the person reading hears God who is speaking, and in praying, responds to him with trusting openness of heart. If it is effectively promoted, this practice will bring to the Church-I am convinced of it-a new spiritual springtime.

When you're just reading a note card but when you're just reading a note card and it doesn't even feel real, it's difficult at times. But I have no problem doing interviews. So I have absolutely no problem doing interviews.

In novels you're able to occupy character's internal thoughts and it's really hard to do in a film or a TV show. When you're reading a character's thoughts or when it's in first person, you're reading kind of their own story, so you have the opportunity to see what makes that character complex or complicated. And to me that's what the whole point of fiction is.

We get used to things, and we like reading the way we're used to reading.

Magazine reading appears to promote more reading.

Books worth reading are worth re-reading.

When I was on the set, I was not talking on the phone or reading anything else. I was just reading things, listening to music and watching things that had to do with the state of the scene. So it would be a constant, maintaining for the whole day that state. If I had an hour off for lunch, I would put on a movie or something that would help me stay in that area. And at the end of the day, I was like a zombie.

Learning is acquired by reading books; much more necessary learning, the knowledge of the world, is only to be acquired by reading men, and studying all the various editions of them.

In the early '90s, when I really started to find my voice, I was reading a lot of books, and I was moved by the writers, like Chinua Achebe, and I wanted to be able to write rhymes that were as potent as what I was reading.

I've been reading Peter Straub since I was a teenager, and his work is hardwired into my brain. A Dark Matter contains echoes of all that has been great about Straub's previous work and builds upon it. This Rashomon-like tale is as spooky and frightening as anything he has written, but it's also an intense and moving celebration of love. Out of the darkness comes, ultimately, a surprising and haunting sense of joy.

As a young man, I saw families prosper without reading because there were always sufficient opportunities for willing workers who could follow simple instructions. This is no longer the case. Children who don't read are, in the main, destined for lesser lives. I feel a deep sense of responsibility to change this.

People really get myopic as they get older. We're not a culture that encourages dreaming or distraction. We're not ever good at just being. I remember reading some Adrienne Rich quote where she talks about how important it was just to watch bubbles rise in a glass.

There is no learned man but will confess be hath much profited by reading controversies,--his senses awakened, his judgment sharpened, and the truth which he holds firmly established. If then it be profitable for him to read, why should it not at least be tolerable and free for his adversary to write? In logic they teach that contraries laid together, more evidently appear; it follows then, that all controversy being permitted, falsehood will appear more false, and truth the more true; which must needs conduce much to the general confirmation of an implicit truth.

I can be incredibly angry with someone, I can be incredibly critical, but... I went through a period where I was reading a lot of memoirs of guards in holocausts and serial killers. I like to understand why people do bad things.

As a youngster I was a great dreamer, reading many books of adventure and walking lonely miles with my head in the clouds.

Philosophy is not a body of knowledge to impart to someone, that's why reading philosophy books isn't always the best way of learning philosophy. Philosophy is really more the process of rational engagement, rational reflection with a diversity of views and ideas and opinions and trying to sort of reason your way through to a more reflective position. I think if you look at it that way, philosophizing is to some extent some small way a part of almost everyone's lives although they don't recognize it as such and a lot of people are embarrassed about it.

Through reading, I escaped the bad parts of my life in the South Bronx. And, through books, I got to travel the world and the universe. It, to me, was a passport out of my childhood and it remains a way - through the power of words - to change the world.

Wearing glasses for reading meant surrendering to old age without the least bit of a fight.

All plays stem from personal experience. I was reading psychoanalytic lit for a couple of years, obsessively, in depth, and I got involved in analyzing everyone around me. . . . Eventually, all my friends' eyes began to glaze over when I started talking this way, and I got the hint that there might be something comical in it.