Quotes on Reading

I always read. You know how sharks have to keep swimming or they die? I’m like that. If I stop reading, I die.

Reading is performance. The reader--the child under the blanket with a flashlight, the woman at the kitchen table, the man at the library desk--performs the work. The performance is silent. The readers hear the sounds of the words and the beat of the sentences only in their inner ear. Silent drummers on noiseless drums. An amazing performance in an amazing theater.

A lively and lasting sense of filial duty is more effectually impressed on the mind of a son or daughter by reading King Lear, than by all the dry volumes of ethics, and divinity that ever were written.

I think I write in order to discover on my shelf a new book that I would enjoy reading, or to see a new play that would engross me.

Seek the lofty by reading, hearing and seeing great work at some moment every day.

I am a part of everything that I have read.

We read five words on the first page of a really good novel and we begin to forget that we are reading printed words on a page; we begin to see images.

Some read to think, these are rare; some to write, these are common; and some read to talk, and these form the great majority.

There is only one way to read, which is to browse in libraries and bookshops, picking up books that attract you, reading only those, dropping them when they bore you, skipping the parts that drag-and never, never reading anything because you feel you ought, or because it is part of a trend or a movement. Remember that the book which bores you when you are twenty or thirty will open doors for you when you are forty or fifty-and vise versa. Don’t read a book out of its right time for you.

This will never be a civilized country until we spend more money for books than we do for chewing gum.

The fun of reading as "an exchange between consciousnesses, a way for human beings to talk to each other about stuff we can't normally talk about."

I was so long writing my review that I never got around to reading the book.

Until it is kindled by a spirit as flamingly alive as the one which gave it birth a book is dead to us. Words divested of their magic are but dead hieroglyphs.

If a secret history of books could be written, and the author's private thoughts and meanings noted down alongside of his story, how many insipid volumes would become interesting, and dull tales excite the reader!

The consolation of reading biography: Most great men have led lives even more miserable than our own.

If one wanted to depict the whole thing graphically, every episode, with its climax, would require a three-dimensional, or, rather, no model: every experience is unrepeatable. What makes lovemaking and reading resemble each other most is that within both of them times and spaces open, different from measurable time and space.

A reader lives a thousand lives before he dies, said Jojen. The man who never reads lives only one.

For her, reading was directly linked to pleasure, not to knowledge or enigmas or constructions or verbal labyrinths.

I can't tell you the number of times I looked down at what was going on on the ground, or I was engaged in a fight somewhere, and I knew within a couple of minutes how I was going to screw up the enemy. And I knew it because I'd done so much reading.

The man who never reads lives only one.

He had been so busy getting away from the library, he hadn't paid attention to where he was going.