Quotes on Reading

Indeed, learning to write may be part of learning to read. For all I know, writing comes out of a superior devotion to reading.

I am too fond of reading books to care to write them.

It is with the reading of books the same as with looking at pictures; one must, without doubt, without hesitations, with assurance, admire what is beautiful.

There is no mistaking a real book when one meets it. It is like falling in love.

Books may well be the only true magic.

A house without books is like a room without windows.

It may be enough to study history in all its nuance and ambiguity for its own sake. But there is no country free of the need to find new ways of reading the past as an inspiring way of thinking about everything else, including the present.

I used to take my short stories to girls' homes and read them to them. Can you imagine the reaction reading a short story to a girl instead of pawing her?

Without libraries what have we? We have no past and no future.

I was reading the dictionary. I thought it was a poem about everything.

Somewhere, everywhere, now hidden, now apparent in what ever is written down, is the form of a human being. If we seek to know him, are we idly occupied?

A word after a word after a word is power.

The imagination imitates. It is the critical spirit that creates.

If one cannot enjoy reading a book over and over again, there is no use in reading it at all.

Good friends, good books and a sleepy conscience: this is the ideal life.

In reading the lives of great men, I found that the first victory they won was over themselves... self-discipline with all of them came first.

I bear solemn witness to the fact that NATO heads of state and of government meet only to go through the tedious motions of reading speeches, drafted by others, with the principal objective of not rocking the boat.

My education was the liberty I had to read indiscriminately and all the time, with my eyes hanging out.

Reading - the best state yet to keep absolute loneliness at bay.

One always tends to overpraise a long book, because one has got through it.

Beware of the person of one book.