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Reading Quotes


"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."


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


"I write the story that nobody reads. Someday, I'm going to write it in German to see if anyone notices."


"Without sounding pompous, I really do feel that I have a set of standards that I must adhere to, even leaving aside considerations of what the readers expect."


"I probably read 100 times more than I write, but that way when I move my characters through it, I know."


"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."


"You can read Kant by yourself, if you wanted to; but you must share a joke with someone else."


"He who dreads hostility too much is unfit to rule."


"Woe, woe, woe... in a little while we shall all be dead. Therefore let us behave as though we were dead already."


"We read advertisements... to discover and enlarge our desires. We are always ready - even eager - to discover, from the announcement of a new product, what we have all along wanted without really knowing it."


"The inevitable has always found me ready and hopeful."


"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."


"I wasn't a very discriminating reader. I read just about everything that came along."


"I'm reading a book about Romaine Brooks, a wonderful painter from early in the last century."


"I have invited our little seamstress to take her thread and needle and sew our two mouths together."


"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."


"My reading of history convinces me that most bad government has grown out of too much government."


"I don't exactly know what it means to be ready. A cake when the oven timer goes off? Am I fully baked, or only half-baked?"


"I think she was ready to go. Not to be kicked out. Go at the top. Undefeated."


"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."


"We only understand that which already within us."


"If I am communicating to my readers exactly what the White House believes on any certain issue, that's reporting to them an unvarnished, unfiltered version of what they - the Administration - believe."


"Reading takes time, and the glass teat takes too much of it."


"We shouldn't have got married, really. Shouldn't have got married. Too young. Not ready for it."



"Perchance the chemist is already damned and the guardian the blackest."


"Reading your own material aloud forces you to listen."


"I have a great deal of sympathy for reluctant readers because I was one. I would do anything to avoid reading. In my case, it wasn't until I was 13 and discovered the 'Lord of the Rings' that I learned to love reading."


"I enjoy books as misers enjoy treasures, because I know I can enjoy them whenever I please."


"The true reader reads every work seriously in the sense that he reads it whole-heartedly, makes himself as receptive as he can. But for that very reason he cannot possibly read every work solemly or gravely. For he will read 'in the same spirit that the author writ.'... He will never commit the error of trying to munch whipped cream as if it were venison."


"I shall keep my book on the table here, and read a little every morning as soon as I wake, for I know it will do me good, and help me through the day."


"I started reading when I was about three, a little over three."


"One must be an inventor to read well. There is then creative reading as well as creative writing."


"I was in the tennis bubble. I wasn't thinking about the big picture. I didn't notice what they said on television, I wasn't reading any papers. I had a coach and a manager, and they kept me in the bubble."
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