Explore Quotes on Reading

If I have a talent for making some fourth-grader who hates school and reading to hate it a little less, then I have to do the most with what I've been issued.

You should always have 2 books...the one you're reading and the one you're writing.

I'll be reading books until the next challenger arrives. That will calm my nerves, so that I may deal with all situations without panicking.

Without a mission and a sense of whom you write for, you aren't worth reading.

Writing is 90 percent procrastination: reading magazines, eating cereal out of the box, watching infomercials.

What sense of superiority it gives one to escape reading some book which every one else is reading.

As you know from reading many of these Negro writers, we don't deal too much with the discussion of democracy and what it means and how improvisation fits in all that.

Watching a scene from a film in slow motion is possible, but there’s an unreal air to it; reading a passage from a book slowly does nothing to rob the words of their power. A film presents images; a book creates images inside the reader, with the reader’s active participation. Books are good for your brain.

Unlike television, reading does not swallow the senses or dictate thought. Reading stimulates the ecology of the imagination. Can you remember the wonder you felt when first reading The Jungle Book or Tom Sawyer or Huckleberry Finn? Kipling’s world within a world; Twain’s slow river, the feel of freedom and sand on the secret island, and in the depths of the cave?

The delights of reading impart the vivacity of youth even to old age.

After reading Edgar Allan Poe. Something the critics have not noticed: a new literary world pointing to the literature of the 20th Century. Scientific miracles, fables on the pattern A+ B, a clear-sighted, sickly literature. No more poetry but analytic fantasy. Something monomaniacal. Things playing a more important part than people; love giving away to deductions and other forms of ideas, style, subject and interest. The basis of the novel transferred from the heart to the head, from the passion to the idea, from the drama to the denouement.

Sometimes I get the feeling that there are orgies going on all over new York City, and somebody says, `Let's call Desmond,' and somebody else says, 'Why bother? He's probably home reading the Encyclopedia Britannica.'

So take seriously the story that God has given you to live. It’s time to read your own life, because your story is the one that could set us all ablaze.

The only way to build a church, if you have a Bible church, is to preach out of the Bible, teach out of the Bible, read out of the Bible.

I went to college, but I learned to write by reading - and writing.

Reading is a technology for perspective-taking. When someone else's thoughts are in your head, you are observing the world from that person's vantage point.

I'm never the kind of person who's sitting at home reading the charts and basing how I feel about myself or even my career on stats. I've always based it on, 'Am I doing the best that I can do?'

People can lose their lives in libraries. They ought to be warned.

If you read the first page of one of my novels, I can guarantee that you will read the last one. This isn't just social commentary. This is also about writing good page-turners. I want people to keep reading.

When I am dead, I hope it may be said: His sins were scarlet, but his books were read.

What gunpowder did for war the printing press has done for the mind.