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Reading Quotes
"The greatest gift is the passion for reading. It is cheap, it consoles, it distracts, it excites, it gives you knowledge of the world and experience of a wide kind. It is a moral illumination."
20
"Tell me what you read and I'll tell you who you are is true enough, but I'd know you better if you told me what you reread."
20
"Sometimes poetry is inspired by the conversation entered into by reading other poems."
20
"We're going to have the same demographic spread of nutcases and the same spread of everybody in between."
20
"The reading or non-reading a book will never keep down a single petticoat."
20
"A finished product is one that has already seen its better days."
20
"The greatest gift is a passion for reading. It is cheap, it consoles, it distracts, it excites, it gives you knowledge of the world and experience of a wide kind. It is a moral illumination."
20
"Certain readers resented me when they could no longer recognize their territory, their institution."
20
"In addition to the dread of Indians, Texas held out no inducements for Mexican emigrants."
20
"My reading of history convinces me that most bad government has grown out of too much government."
19
"I think she was ready to go. Not to be kicked out. Go at the top. Undefeated."
19
"The other thing that happened in 1883 was my reading of Thoreau's Walden."
19
"Not a single person I named hadn't already been named at least a half-dozen times and wasn't already on he blacklist."
19
"I write the story that nobody reads. Someday, I'm going to write it in German to see if anyone notices."
18
"I like the sound of words, but I don't ever really expect my slow, slanted impression of the world to change by what I read."
18
"I have invited our little seamstress to take her thread and needle and sew our two mouths together."
18
"And I've got some screenplays and plays ready to dip into when I need to."
18
"I'm never going to complain about receiving free early copies of books, because clearly there's nothing to complain about, but it does introduce a rogue element into one's otherwise carefully plotted reading schedule. ...Being a reader is sort of like being president, except reading involves fewer state dinners, usually. You have this agenda you want to get through, but you get distracted by life events, e.g., books arriving in the mail/World War III, and you are temporarly deflected from your chosen path."
18
"Of course. You get everything from books."
18
"I notice when I'm on these trips, I read like mad. It's the only thing that seems to center me, bring me back to remembering who I am. Or forgetting who I am!"
17
"He looked like such a Republican. He dressed like Pee-Wee Herman. But had I known what he had done when I was reading about him, I might have thought different."
16
"I don't read anything anymore. I don't have the eyesight. I read my own copy, that's all. I think I've read everything that's worth reading."
16
"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."
15
"Quite casually I wander into my plot, poke around with my characters for a while, then amble off, leaving no moral proved and no reader improved."
15
"I have proved by actual trial that a letter, that takes an hour to write, takes only about 3 minutes to read!"
14
"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."
14
"What's the use trying to read Shakespeare, especially in one of those little paper editions whose pages get ruffled, or stuck together with sea-water?"
13
"Never read a book through merely because you have begun it."
13
"Noting that Huckleberry Finn was originally both valued and reviled because it shows the reader that the accepted moral code and social hierarchy is not always correct."
13
"The unread story is not a story; it is little black marks on wood pulp. The reader, reading it, makes it live: a live thing, a story."
12
"What is without dispute...is that the readers need [the BookWorld] just as much as we need them-to bring order to their apparent chaos, if nothing else."
12
"He who dreads hostility too much is unfit to rule."
12
"Books are always good company if you have the right sort. Let me pick out some for you.' And Mrs. Jo made a bee-line to the well-laden shelves, which were the joy of her heart and the comfort of her life."
12
"The test of literature is, I suppose, whether we ourselves live more intensely for the reading of it."
12
"We judge ourselves by what we feel capable of doing, while others judge us by what we have already done."
12
"I had been a student in Vienna, and one of the neat little things I had found out was about that zoo. It was a good debut novel for me to have published. I was 26 or 27 when it was published. I already had a kid and would soon have a second."
11
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