Explore Quotes on Reading

I love my friends and family, but I also love it when they can't find me and I can spend all day reading or walking all alone, in silence, eight thousand miles away from everyone. All alone and unreachable in a foreign country is one my most favorite possible things to be.

To read a writer is for me not merely to get an idea of what he says, but to go off with him and travel in his company.

Books are those faithful mirrors that reflect to our mind the minds of sages and heroes.

My early and invincible love of reading I would not exchange for all the riches of India.

Let us read with method, and propose to ourselves an end to which our studies may point. The use of reading is to aid us in thinking.

My idea of a good time is creating something and reading a good book.

The books that help you most are those which make you think that most. The hardest way of learning is that of easy reading; but a great book that comes from a great thinker is a ship of thought, deep freighted with truth and beauty.

When I see great boxers, it's like reading a wonderful poem.

I'm constantly reading books on God or the absence of God and atheism.

My free time at home is usually spent emailing, listening to music, reading and talking on the phone. I wish I was on the phone less, but I have been fortunate to stay in touch with so many incredible friends.

This is unusual for me. I have given readings and not lectures. I have told people who ask for lectures that I have no lecture to give. And that is true.

I am the kind of writer that people think other people are reading.

I would like to spare the time and effort of hack reviewers and, generally, persons who move their lips when reading.

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.

There is a crisis involving reading in certain communities.

You can't develop character by reading books. You develop it from conflict.

The impact of the Yemeni manuscripts is still to be felt. Their variant readings and verse orders are all very significant. Everybody agrees on that. These manuscripts say that the early history of the Koranic texts is much more of an open question than many have suspected: the text was less stable, and therefore had less authority, than has always been claimed.

I even love the smell of books.

[About reading Rachel Carson's Silent Spring, age 14, in the back seat of his parents' sedan. I almost threw up. I got physically ill when I learned that ospreys and peregrine falcons weren't raising chicks because of what people were spraying on bugs at their farms and lawns. This was the first time I learned that humans could impact the environment with chemicals. [That a corporation would create a product that didn't operate as advertised] was shocking in a way we weren't inured to.

No amount of reading or memorizing will make you successful in life. It is the understanding and application of wise thought which counts.

The novel form is about the protagonist's struggle to transform his arbitrary, fragmented, given experience into a narrative as meaningful as his favorite books.