reading quotes

I’ve done auditions where the casting director is taking the paper out of my hand in the middle of reading.

When I read about the evils of drinking, I gave up reading.

I cannot live without books.

My father was a great sympathizer of Ahad Ha’am. Every Friday night we would read Hebrew together, and often the reading was Ahad Ha’am’s essays.

When you’re young, you keep reading new writers and you keep changing your mind about how you ought to sound.

I read a lot of obscure books and it is nice to open a book.

Some books leave us free and some books make us free.

Read with care, George Orwell’s diaries, from the years 1931 to 1949, can greatly enrich our understanding of how Orwell transmuted the raw material of everyday experience into some of his best-known novels and polemics.

I don’t read books much.

When I was seven or eight years old, I began to read the science-fiction magazines that were brought by guests into my grandparents‘ boarding house in Waukegan, Illinois. Those were the years when Hugo Gernsback was publishing ‚Amazing Stories,‘ with vivid, appallingly imaginative cover paintings that fed my hungry imagination.

I mean, what would I be doing if I couldn’t write? But that fortunately hasn’t proved to be the case and I can read any day. I still read a lot, and I can write any day, but much more slowly and fewer words.

A good day is one where I can not just read a book, but write a review of it. Maybe today I’ll be able to do that. I get for some reason somewhat stronger when the sun starts to go down. Dusk is a good time for me. I’m crepuscular.

The book that convinced me I wanted to be a writer was ‚Crime and Punishment‘. I put the thing down after reading it in a fever over two or three days… I said, ‚If this is what a book can be, then that is what I want to do.‘

Books constitute capital. A library book lasts as long as a house, for hundreds of years. It is not, then, an article of mere consumption but fairly of capital, and often in the case of professional men, setting out in life, it is their only capital.

I haven’t read Horowitz. I didn’t used to read him when he was a Stalinist, and I don’t read him today.

When you read, I’m sure you don’t realize that your eyes are going backwards and forwards and to this place and that place. Mine don’t do that.

I spend a lot of time reading.

I was a very keen reader of science fiction.

You don’t read in your own field. You read in that field when you’re young, so that you can learn.

I read the Bible to myself; I’ll take any translation, any edition, and read it aloud, just to hear the language, hear the rhythm, and remind myself how beautiful English is.

You can’t die with an unfinished book.

The problem isn’t that Johnny can’t read. The problem isn’t even that Johnny can’t think. The problem is that Johnny doesn’t know what thinking is; he confuses it with feeling.

I have trouble reading modern Hebrew. In the 1950s, I could read anything. I don’t know how much experience you’ve had with contemporary Hebrew. It’s quite difficult.

I have written a book. This will come as quite a shock to some. They didn’t think I could read, much less write.

When you pick up a book, everyone knows it’s imaginary. You don’t have to pretend it’s not a book. We don’t have to pretend that people don’t write books. That omniscient third-person narration isn’t the only way to do it. Once you’re writing in the first person, then the narrator is a writer.

There is no author whose books I look forward to more than Vaclav Smil.

To a philosopher all news, as it is called, is gossip, and they who edit and read it are old women over their tea.

Stay active. Read the Word. Worship with other believers. Continue to give. Keep learning and growing. Your faith will be unleashed!

The decline of literature indicates the decline of a nation.

I’m sure most parents read to their children to explain what certain things mean. So books are a good way to convey a message to anybody. Everybody reads.

I used to take my short stories to girls‘ homes and read them to them. Can you imagine the reaction reading a short story to a girl instead of pawing her?

Books are like a mirror. If an ass looks in, you can’t expect an angel to look out.

I try to read as much as I can. I try to read an informative article every day. I try to stay read up on our world issues.

Whether I’m at the office, at home, or on the road, I always have a stack of books I’m looking forward to reading.

Read the best books first, or you may not have a chance to read them at all.

I liked to write from the time I was about 12 or 13. I loved to read. And since I only spoke to my brother, I would write down my thoughts. And I think I wrote some of the worst poetry west of the Rockies. But by the time I was in my 20s, I found myself writing little essays and more poetry – writing at writing.

I was enjoying myself writing, because I don’t know what’s going to happen when I take a ride around that corner. You don’t know at all what you’re going to find there. That can be thrilling when you read a book, especially when you’re a kid and you’re reading stories.

The best books… are those that tell you what you know already.

I was always very curious as a young man about why older writers who I met seemed so indifferent to what was going on, whereas I, in my 20s, was reading everything. Everything seemed important. But they were only interested in the writers they admired when they were young, and I didn’t understand it then, but now, now I understand it.

How long most people would look at the best book before they would give the price of a large turbot for it?

I was a very keen reader of science fiction, and during the time I was going to libraries, it was good, written by people who knew their science.

A book worth reading is worth buying.

One thing that writers have in common is that they are readers first. They have read lots and lots of stuff, because they’re just infested with lots of stuff.

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

A reader can never tell if it’s a real thimble or an imaginary thimble, because by the time you’re reading it, they’re the same. It’s a thimble. It’s in the book.

The only superstition I have is that I must start a new book on the same day that I finish the last one, even if it’s just a few notes in a file. I dread not having work in progress.

You don’t have to burn books to destroy a culture. Just get people to stop reading them.

For a person who grew up in the ’30s and ’40s in the segregated South, with so many doors closed without explanation to me, libraries and books said, ‚Here I am, read me.‘ Over time I have learned I am at my best around books.

I started out in life as a poet; I was only writing poetry all through my 20s. It wasn’t until I was about 30 that I got serious about writing prose. While I was writing poems, I would often divert myself by reading detective novels; I liked them.

Many people tell me that they don ‚t know what to feel when they finish one of my books because the story was dark, or complicated, or strange. But while they were reading it, they were inside my world and they were happy. That’s good.

Censorship ends in logical completeness when nobody is allowed to read any books except the books that nobody reads.

I don’t know if I officially proofread my father’s book, but I read it. I did get some conception of grammar in general from that.

Outside of a dog, a book is a man’s best friend. Inside of a dog it’s too dark to read.

Together with a culture of work, there must be a culture of leisure as gratification. To put it another way: people who work must take the time to relax, to be with their families, to enjoy themselves, read, listen to music, play a sport.

What do we, as a nation, care about books? How much do you think we spend altogether on our libraries, public or private, as compared with what we spend on our horses?

Everywhere I go, the kids call me ‚the book lady.‘ The older I get, the more appreciative I seem to be of the ‚book lady‘ title. It makes me feel more like a legitimate person, not just a singer or an entertainer. But it makes me feel like I’ve done something good with my life and with my success.

Reading and writing are connected. I learned to read very early so I could read the comics, which I then started to draw.

Libraries raised me.

When I was a kid, I read the science-fiction shelves, and I read the fantasy shelves.

The ear is the only true writer and the only true reader.