Reading quotes
6.6K quotes on this topic — from poets, philosophers, and thinkers across history.
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Browse quotes that often appear alongside reading — connected by shared ideas and recurring themes.
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"I love fantasy. I grew up reading fantasy. But, I wanted to put a somewhat different spin on it. The whole trope of absolute good versus absolute evil, which was wonderful in the hands of J.R. Tolkien, became cliche and rote in the hands of the many Tolkien imitators that followed."
"I was just a kid selling monster stories to the kids in the projects, complete with a dramatic reading, making the werewolf sounds. My career was aborted early on because one of my main customers started to have nightmares and his mother came to my mother and my mother shut down my whole business."
"Remarkably, [Sen. Dianne] Feinstein was reading her statement. So her mare's-nest of inapposite words and unclear thoughts cannot be excused as symptoms of Biden's Disease, that form of logorrhea that causes victims, such as Sen. Joe Biden, to become lost on the syntactical back roads of their extemporaneous rhetoric."
"On Phantom... I listened to the music while I was reading the script. And it had just blown me away. I really... I was so excited about it. It's been a long time since I really got so excited about something."
"People are worse educated than they used to be. Certainly they are not very interested in reading books, as opposed to watching television, movies. They are used to getting things through the eye and the ear. In a small way, literature goes on being written, but few people like it. Once it's bureaucratized by the schoolteachers, the game's up."
"The worst that can be said about pornography is that it leads not to anti-social acts but to the reading of more pornography"
"I don't think contemporary writers spend a lot of time reading each other. Particularly writers of the same nationality."
"I took Eugene Sue's Arthur from the reading-room. It's indescribable, enough to make you vomit. You have to read this to realize the pitifulness of money, success, and the public. Literature has become consumptive. It spits and slobbers, covers its blisters with salve and sticking-plaster, and has grown bald from too much hair-slicking. It would take Christ of art to cure this leper."
"I'm absolutely removed from the world at such times...The hours go by without my knowing it. Sitting there I'm wandering in countries I can see every detail of - I'm playing a role in the story I'm reading. I actually feel I'm the characters - I live and breath with them."
"I do like to keep abreast of what the hardcore vocal members of the comics-reading audience are talking about on Internet message boards, but there are so few of them, as a percentage of the buying audience, that I can't allow their opinions to dictate story direction."
"Going back to why people don't vote, I presume the main reason is because they understand without reading political science texts that it doesn't make any difference how they vote. It's not going to affect policy, so why bother?"
"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."
"Surely few if any readers have come across the sentence they are now reading, and someone who had by chance heard or seen it could not possibly remember such a fact."
"Plainly, such an approach does not exclude other ways of trying to comprehend the world. Someone committed to it (as I am) can consistently believe (as I do) that we learn much more of human interest about how people think and feel and act by reading novels or studying history than from all of naturalistic psychology, and perhaps always will; similarly, the arts may offer appreciation of the heavens to which astrophysics cannot aspire."
"I also learned from reading the left-wing press about the [Franklin] Roosevelt administration's indirect support for Francisco Franco, which was not well known, and still isn't."
"I never really liked poetry readings; I liked to read poetry by myself, but I liked singing, chanting my lyrics to this jazz group."
"The Library is a wilderness of books."
"What would we not give for some great poem to read now, which would be in harmony with the scenery,--for if men read aright, methinks they would never read anything but poems. No history nor philosophy can supply their place."
"It is remarkable, but on the whole, perhaps, not to be lamented, that the world is so unkind to a new book. Any distinguished traveler who comes to our shores is likely to get more dinners and speeches of welcome than he can well dispose of, but the best books, if noticed at all, meet with coldness and suspicion, or, what is worse, gratuitous, off-hand criticism."
"Why should we leave it to Harper & Brothers and Redding & Co. to select our reading?"
