Reading quotes
6.6K quotes on this topic — from poets, philosophers, and thinkers across history.
Explore further
Browse quotes that often appear alongside reading — connected by shared ideas and recurring themes.
Quote collection
Follow a thought to its author, or read the full quote page.
"It was Sci-Fi and fantasy that got me reading, and Sci-Fi writers in particular have pack rat minds. They introduce all sorts of interesting themes and ideas into their books, and so for me it was a short leap to go from the fantasy and Sci-Fi genres to folklore, mythology, ancient history and philosophy. I did not read philosophy because I set out to become a philosopher; I read it because it looked interesting."
"Don't write for money. Write because you love to do something. If you write for money, you won't write anything worth reading."
"When I graduated from high school I couldn't go to college, so I went to the library 3 days a week for 10 years."
"My parents read the comics to me, and I fell in love with comic strips. I've collected them all of my life. I have a complete collection of all the "Buck Rogers" Sunday funnies and daily paper strips, I have all of "Prince Valiant" put away, all of "Tarzan," which appeared in the Sunday funnies in 1932 right on up through high school. So I've learned a lot from reading comics as a child."
"I would like to spare the time and effort of hack reviewers and, generally, persons who move their lips when reading."
"If a book comes from the heart, it will contrive to reach other hearts; all art and author-craft are of small amount to that."
"We have not read an author till we have seen his object, whatever it may be, as he saw it."
"Learn to be good readers, which is perhaps a more difficult thing than you imagine. Learn to be discriminative in your reading; to read faithfully, and with your best attention, all kinds of things which you have a real interest in,--a real, not an imaginary,--and which you find to be really fit for what you are engaged in."
"Books are the money of Literature, but only the counters of Science."
"No religious reading, instruction or exercise, shall be prescribed or practiced [in the elementary schools] inconsistent with the tenets of any religious sect or denomination."
"From forty years' experience of the wretched guess-work of the newspapers of what is not done in open daylight, and of their falsehood even as to that, I rarely think them worth reading, and almost never worth notice."
"A good writer preserves an air of freedom in his prose, so that the reader won't know how a story will end - even if he's reading a history book."
"Never check email first thing in the morning. Instead, complete your most important task before 11:00 A.M. to avoid using lunch or reading email as a postponement excuse."
"When you decide you want to make a film, you start listening to everything that anyone has to say about filmmaking and reading everything, and there's a maxim about film being a visual medium, and so you need to make, in a sense, a silent movie and layer on dialogue."
"I don't have the insight with the Longhorns that I do with the two teams that I own, but as a fan and reading the sports pages, I'm bullish about the Longhorns."
"Above all, have a good time. If you aren’t enjoying writing it, you can hardly expect someone else to enjoy reading it."
"So many (too many) books are published every year, and it seems everyone is writing a book. Perhaps we should all be reading more and writing less!"
"Since each story presents its own technical problems, obviously one can't generalize about them on a two-times-two-equals-four basis. Finding the right form for your story is simply to realize the most natural way of telling the story. The test of whether or not a writer has defined the natural shape of his story is just this: After reading it, can you imagine it differently, or does it silence your imagination and seem to you absolute and final? As an orange is final. As an orange is something nature has made just right."
"There is a certain kind of peace that is not merely the absence of war. It is larger than that. The peace I am thinking of is not at the mercy of history's rule, nor is it a passive surrender to the status quo. The peace I am thinking of is the dance of an open mind when it engages another equally open one -- an activity that occurs most naturally, most often in the reading/writing world we live in. Accessible as it is, this particular kind of peace warrants vigilance."
"The older I've got the less I find myself going back and re-reading or really reading new fiction or poetry."
