Quotes on Reading

Much reading has brought upon us a learned barbarism.

All art is unstable. Its meaning is not necessarily that implied by the author. There is no authoritative voice. There are only multiple readings.

Boredom is a certain sign that we are allowing our faculties to rust in idleness.

You have to resign yourself to the fact that you waste a lot of trees before you write anything you really like, and that's just the way it is. It's like learning an instrument, you've got to be prepared for hitting wrong notes occasionally, or quite a lot, cause I wrote an awful lot before I wrote anything I was really happy with. And read a lot. Reading really helps. Read anything you can get your hands on.

Reading can be a road to freedom or a key to a secret garden, which, if tended, will transform all of life.

Typically, when you read, you have more time to think. Reading gives you a unique pause button for comprehension and insight. By and large, with oral language - when you watch a film or listen to a tape - you don't press pause.

A capacity, and taste, for reading, gives access to whatever has already been discovered by others. It is the key, or one of the keys, to the already solved problems. And not only so. It gives a relish, and facility, for successfully pursuing the [yet] unsolved ones.

Literature is a luxury; fiction is a necessity.

What a glorious garden of wonders the lights of Broadway would be to anyone lucky enough to be unable to read.

I kept always two books in my pocket, one to read, one to write in.

A well-stocked mind is safe from boredom.

A man only learns by two things; one is reading and the other is association with smarter people.

Many people, myself among them, feel better at the mere sight of a book.

Strange now to think of you, gone without corsets & eyes, while I walk on the sunny pavement of Greenwich Village. downtown Manhattan, clear winter noon, and I've been up all night, talking, talking, reading the Kaddish aloud, listening to Ray Charles blues shout blind on the phonograph

Anything's possible in Human Nature," Chacko said in his Reading Aloud voice. Talking to the darkness now, suddenly insensitive to his little fountain-haired niece. "Love. Madness. Hope. Infinite joy." Of the four things that were Possible in Human Nature, Rahel thought that Infinnate Joy sounded the saddest. Perhaps because of the way Chacko said it. Infinnate Joy. With a church sound to it. Like a sad fish with fins all over.

No man can be called friendless who has God and the companionship of good books.

A capacity and taste for reading gives access to whatever has already been discovered by others.

We have to move into the 21st century, but we should do so with great care to build a 'bi-literate' brain that has the circuitry for 'deep reading' skills and, at the same time, is adept with technology.

I think reading Shakespeare's plays when I was young was extremely important. He had the ability to make utter strangers come alive.

I much prefer working with kids whose life could be completely upended by a reading of a book over a weekend. You give them a book to read - they go home and come back a changed person. And that is so much more interesting and exciting.

I started off believing all men were equal. I now know that's the most unlikely thing ever to have been... But by observation, reading, watching, arguing, asking, that is the conclusion I've come to.