Quotes on Reading

I think a book should be judged 10 years later, after reading and re-reading it.

Some of the best memories of my childhood that I have are the times that I played hooky from school so I could spend my days in the public library reading all the wonderful books at my disposal.

Any book worth banning is a book worth reading.

The mind must be developed by you alone. There is no way for others to do the work and for you to reap the results. Reading someone else's blueprint of mental progress will not transfer its realizations to you. You have to develop them yourself.

Like writing, reading is a protest against the insufficiencies of life.

If my books can help children become readers then I feel I have accomplished something important.

Reading is equivalent to thinking with someone else's head instead of with one's own.

Reading is not a duty, and has consequently no business to be made disagreeable.

I want to write so well that a person is 30 or 40 pages in a book of mine ... before she realizes she's reading.

Creation stories had never been regarded as historically accurate; their purpose was therapeutic. But once you start reading Genesis as scientifically valid, you have bad science and bad religion.

There is no shortage of wonderful writers. What we lack is a dependable mass of readers.

There are no bad books any more than there are ugly women.

There's a marvelous sense of mastery that comes with writing a sentence that sounds exactly as you want it to. It's like trying to write a song, making tiny tweaks, reading it out loud, shifting things to make it sound a certain way... Sometimes it feels like digging out of a hole, but sometimes it feels like flying. When it's working and the rhythm's there, it does feel like magic to me.

A classic is a book which with each rereading offers as much of a sense of discovery as the first reading.

Some people become so expert at reading between the lines they don't read the lines.

I suppose every old scholar has had the experience of reading something in a book which was significant to him, but which he could never find again. Sure he is that he read it there, but no one else ever read it, nor can he find it again, though he buy the book and ransack every page.

I, too, dislike it. Reading it, however, with a perfect contempt for it, one discovers in it, after all, a place for the genuine.

WIDE, the margin between carte blanche and the white page. Nevertheless it is not in the margin that you can find me, but in the yet whiter one that separates the word-strewn sheet from the transparent, the written page from the one to be written in the infinite space where the eye turns back to the eye, and the hand to the pen, where all we write is erased, even as you write it. For the book imperceptibly takes shape within the book we will never finish. There is my desert.

Read books are far less valuable than unread ones.

If you continually write and read yourself as a fiction, you can change what's crushing you.

Let books be your dining table, / And you shall be full of delights. / Let them be your mattress,/And you shall sleep restful nights