Quotes on Reading

I was very lucky to have a father who read to us when we were children. And he didn't just read books - he brought them alive. We couldn't wait for the next chapter. So my love of reading started early and has stayed with me all my life.

Be careful about reading health books. You may die of a misprint.

To communicate is our chief business; society and friendship our chief delights; and reading, not to acquire knowledge, not to earn a living, but to extend our intercourse beyond our own time and province.

I started off believing all men were equal. I now know that's the most unlikely thing ever to have been, because millions of years have passed over evolution, people have scattered across the face of this earth, been isolated from each other, developed independently, had different intermixtures between races, peoples, climates, soils... I didn't start off with that knowledge. But by observation, reading, watching, arguing, asking, that is the conclusion I've come to.

Bush has not read enough books to have a developed moral sense. The fewer books you read, the easier it is to become fundamental. In some ways my antiwar stand here is also a stand on anti-literacy. Someone should get G.W. into a reading program, get him to join a book club. Have him read Hamlet, King Lear.

A good novel tells us the truth about its hero; but a bad novel tells us the truth about its author.

Doing research on the Web is like using a library assembled piecemeal by pack rats and vandalized nightly.

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

To read as if your life depended on it would mean to let into your reading your beliefs, the swirl of your dreamlife, the physical sensations of your ordinary carnal life; and simultaneously, to allow what you're reading to pierce routines, safe and impermeable, in which ordinary carnal life is tracked, charted, channeled. Then, what of the right answers, the so-called multiple-choice examination sheet with the number 2 pencil to mark one choice and one choice only?

We know where most of the creativity, the innovation, the stuff that drives productivity lies-in the minds of those closest to the work. It's been there in front of our noses all along while we've been running around chasing robots and reading books on how to become Japanese-or at least manage like them.

An American of the present day reading his Sunday newspaper in a state of lazy collapse is one of the most perfect symbols of the triumph of quantity over quality that the world has yet seen.

As writers become more numerous, it is natural for readers to become more indolent; whence must necessarily arise a desire of attaining knowledge with the greatest possible ease.

No tears in the writer, no tears in the reader.

The wise man reads both books and life itself.

Superman is going to live forever. They'll be reading Superman in the next century when you and I are gone. I felt, in that respect, I was doing the same thing. I wanted to be known. I wasn't going to sell a comic that was going to die quickly.

What is wonderful about great literature is that it transforms the man who reads it towards the condition of the man who wrote.

How is it that, a full two centuries after Jane Austen finished her manuscript, we come to the world of Pride and Prejudice and find ourselves transcending customs, strictures, time, mores, to arrive at a place that educates, amuses, and enthralls us? It is a miracle. We read in bed because reading is halfway between life and dreaming, our own consciousness in someone else's mind.

I knew a gentleman who was so good a manager of his time that he would not even lose that small portion of it which the calls of nature obliged him to pass in the necessary-house; but gradually went through all the Latin poets in those moments.

A book is a gift you can open again and again.

No man understands a deep book until he has seen and lived at least part of its contents.

I believe the teacher's work is largely negative, that it is largely a matter of saying, "This doesn't work because ..." or "This does work because ..." The because is very important. The teacher can help you understand the nature of your medium, and he can guide you in your reading.