top of page
Reading Quotes


"Reading, solitude, idleness, a soft and sedentary life, intercourse with women and young people, these are perilous paths for a young man, and these lead him constantly into danger."


"When you're sent something and read it, either you can see it while you read it, or you can't."


"I try to be careful about wording. One of the things I've tried to combat in my blog is the notion that journalists are arrogant and unconcerned with the readership."


"I do believe that reading can help you understand what you're writing and see what others are doing. But sometimes the desire for more information can act as an inhibitor."


"The flood of print has turned reading into a process of gulping rather than savoring."


"The reading or non-reading a book will never keep down a single petticoat."


"And I've got some screenplays and plays ready to dip into when I need to."


"Do not suppose, however, that I intend to urge a diet of classics on anybody. I have seen such diets at work. I have known people who have actually read all, or almost all, the guaranteed Hundred Best Books. God save us from reading nothing but the best."


"It's much easier to consume the visual image than to read something."


"If I do a poetry reading I want people to walk out and say they feel better for having been there - not because you've done a comedy performance but because you're talking about your father dying or having young children, things that touch your soul."


"I would like to provoke ambiguous responses in my readers."


"Even if you never do anything about this, you've benefited from an unjust system. You're already the winner in a game that was rigged to your advantage from the start."


"I've read short stories that are as dense as a 19th century novel and novels that really are short stories filled with a lot of helium."


"Certain readers resented me when they could no longer recognize their territory, their institution."



"CNN is a more diverse brand. It's spread out over more products over there."


"We judge ourselves by what we feel capable of doing, while others judge us by what we have already done."


"I remember when I was in my late teens just getting rid of lots of records, realizing I only ever listened to them when I was reading, or watching TV, or doing something else."


"Between 2 and 5 I'm reading in to find out what's been going on while I've been asleep."


"I don't like books that seem to want to teach me things. Which is not to say that one doesn't learn from books - but you do your own learning in your own way."


"The newspaper fits the reader's program while the listener must fit the broadcaster's program."


"The very definition of the real becomes: that of which it is possible to give an equivalent reproduction. The real is not only what can be reproduced, but that which is always already reproduced. The hyper real."


"The reader really has to step up to the plate and read a short story."


"Perhaps there are none more lazy, or more truly ignorant, than your everlasting readers."


"I don't think anyone wants a reader to be completely lost - certainly not to the point of giving up - but there's something to be said for a book that isn't instantly disposable, that rewards a second reading."


"I do not think that life has any joy to offer so complete, so soul-filling as that which comes upon the imaginative lad, whose spare time is limited, but who is able to snuggle down into a corner with his book, knowing that the next hour is all his own. And how vivid and fresh it all is!"


"But for me, it was a code I myself had invented! Yet I could not read it."



"And, finally, Lincoln was not a good impromptu speaker; he was at his best when he could read from a carefully prepared manuscript. Though maybe a teleprompter could have helped that!"


"Culture means, I think, that you have widened your experience enough through reading and through being a little bit thoughtful about these things that it has changed your outlook in some ways. And not necessarily made you a better human being but made you see things."


"I concentrate on the lives of individuals whom the reader comes to know and feel with intimately."


"We are always looking for the book it is necessary to read next."


"Let me warn you, if you start chasing after views, you'll be left without bread and without views."


"To campaign against colonialism is like barking up a tree that has already been cut down."


"I don't think anyone really is interested in reading about my emotional state. It's not even interesting to me."


"Anybody in the next centuries wanting to know what it was like to be a poet in the middle of the 20th century should read Kaddish."
bottom of page
