To read a newspaper is to refrain from reading something worthwhile. [....] The first discipline of education must therefore be to refuse resolutely to feed the mind with canned chatter.
I had a mother I could only seem to please with verbal accomplishments of some sort or another. She read constantly, so I read constantly. If I used words that might have seemed surprising at a young age, she would recognize that and it would please ...
I never thought I'd be a writer. I never thought I'd be able to read a book, let alone write one. So if books like this inspire kids to write, or even read a whole book, I think it's good.
As an editor, I read Charlotte Rogan's amazing debut novel, 'The Lifeboat,' when it was still in manuscript. I read it in one night, and I really wanted my company to publish it, but we lost it to another house. It's such a wonderful combination of b...
I read 'The Hobbit' while at school. It was OK; can't really remember too much from there, other than the fact I was 10! I never read it again until the script for the film, but it has to be an amazing story when you know Sir Peter Jackson has made t...
I love biographies. I read Patti Smith's 'Just Kids.' I'm into that time frame in New York, the '70s and '80s. In art school, I read 'Close to the Knives,' the autobiography of the artist and AIDS activist David Wojnarowicz.
He liked to read with the silence and the golden color of the whiskey as his companions. He liked food, people, talk, but reading was an inexhaustible pleasure. What the joys of music were to others, words on a page were to him.
It's only adults who read the top layers most of the time. I think children read the internal meanings of everything.
As centuries of dictators have known, an illiterate crowd is the easiest to rule; since the craft of reading cannot be untaught once it has been acquired, the second-best recourse is to limit its scope.
One problem with the work of the New Critics was that their close readings, no matter how brilliant, could not deliver all they seemed to promise.
The truly cultured are capable of owning thousands of unread books without losing their composure or their desire for more.
Good writing is the hardest form of thinking. It involves the agony of turning profoundly difficult thoughts into a lucid form and forcing them into the tightfitting uniform of language, making them visible and clear.
There is nothing more luxurious than eating while you read—unless it be reading while you eat. Amabel did both: they are not the same thing, as you will see if you think the matter over.
I liked reading biographies of writers, even if (as was the case with Monsieur Rabelais)I'd never read any of their actual writing. I flipped to the back and found the highlighted quote ("NEVER USE A HIGHLIGHTER IN MY BOOKS,
See, she goes places when she reads. I know all about that. When I'm reading, wherever I am, I'm always somewhere else.
Get someone-anyone-to read books to you. Having books read to you at any age is the supremo ultimato of living.
Two clichés make us laugh. A hundred cliches move us. For we sense dimly that the clichés are talking , and celebrating a reunion. ( )
What refuge is there for the victim who is oppressed with the feeling that there are a thousand new books he ought to read, while life is only long enough for him to attempt to read a hundred?
Sincere compliments cost nothing and can accomplish so much. In ANY relationship, they are the applause that refreshes.
Because of literature we can decipher, at least partially, the hieroglyphic that existence tends to be for the great majority of human beings.
If you only read what you agree with, you'll never learn anything. - James D. Hodgson
