Reading Quotes | Beyond Motive 5/7

top of page

Reading Quotes

"Nothing more rapidly inclines a person to go into a monastery than reading a book on etiquette. There are so many trivial ways in which it is possible to commit some social sin."

Quentin Crisp, English Writer

Reading, Etiquette, Nothing, Sin

"I sent The World Well Lost to one editor who rejected it on sight, and then wrote a letter to every other editor in the field warning them against the story, and urging them to reject it on sight without reading it."

Theodore Sturgeon, American Writer

Reading, Sight, World

"I would like to provoke ambiguous responses in my readers."

James Ellroy, American Writer

"If I couldn't read, I couldn't live."

Douglas Sirk, German Director

"Watching a movie from beginning to end is like reading, because even though what you see are images, they are telling you a story."

Guillermo Cabrera Infante, Cuban Novelist

Reading, Beginning, End

"Even if you never do anything about this, you've benefited from an unjust system. You're already the winner in a game that was rigged to your advantage from the start."

Jonathan Kozol, American Writer

"The greatest gift is a passion for reading. It is cheap, it consoles, it distracts, it excites, it gives you knowledge of the world and experience of a wide kind. It is a moral illumination."

Elizabeth Hardwick, American Critic

Reading, Experience, Knowledge, Passion

"To spend this particular year reading essays to Dennis Robertson as one's supervisor, and, simultaneously, enjoying membership of the group round Keynes was indeed an intellectual treat."

James Meade, English Economist

"I went into this job to do plays, but that's here for 10 weeks, and the rest of the year I do a lot of other things-the administrative work of planning, reading plays."

Michael Ritchie, American Director

Reading, Work, Job, Planning

"I'm not altogether certain that a fundamentalism of necessity has to argue that it is the only reading of the human experience in order to stay alive."

Chaim Potok, American Author

Reading, Experience, Necessity, Order

"If you are dyslexic, your eyes work fine, your brain works fine, but there is a little short circuit in the wire that goes between the eye and the brain. Reading is not a fluid process."

Bruce Jenner, American Athlete

Reading, Work, Eye, Eyes

"The test of literature is, I suppose, whether we ourselves live more intensely for the reading of it."

Elizabeth Drew, American Journalist

Reading, Literature

"A woman reading Playboy feels a little like a Jew reading a Nazi manual."

Gloria Steinem, American Activist

"I've read short stories that are as dense as a 19th century novel and novels that really are short stories filled with a lot of helium."

Lynn Abbey, American Author

"Certain readers resented me when they could no longer recognize their territory, their institution."

Jacques Derrida, French Philosopher

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

Roger McGough, British Poet

"I don't read anything anymore. I don't have the eyesight. I read my own copy, that's all. I think I've read everything that's worth reading."

John Gould, English Writer

"Learning is acquired by reading books, but the much more necessary learning, the knowledge of the world, is only to be acquired by reading men, and studying all the various facets of them."

Lord Chesterfield, British Statesman

Reading, Men, Knowledge, Books, Learning

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

Lewis Gilbert, British Director

"I rarely read or buy a book because of a review."

Jim Harrison, American Writer

"In reading the lives of great men, I found that the first victory they won was over themselves... self-discipline with all of them came first."

Harry S. Truman, American President

Reading, Men, Victory, First

"Dig within. Within is the wellspring of Good; and it is always ready to bubble up, if you just dig."

Marcus Aurelius, Roman Soldier

"I'm quite illiterate, but I read a lot."

J. D. Salinger, American Novelist

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

Stephen Ambrose, American Historian

"Writing a book for me, I expect, is very similar to the experience of reading the book for my readers."

R. A. Salvatore, American Author

Reading, Experience, Writing

"I enjoyed reading all the classic authors like Isaac Asimov and Bradbury."

William Shatner, Canadian Actor

"There is nothing more distressing or tiresome than a writer standing in front of an audience and reading his work."

William Gaddis, American Novelist

Reading, Work, Nothing, Writer

"Those who are incapable of committing great crimes do not readily suspect them in others."

Francois de La Rochefoucauld, French Writer

"One must be a wise reader to quote wisely and well."

Amos Bronson Alcott, American Educator

"I'm writing a movie about Mozart going to New York in the '60s. I've been reading so many novels."

John Cale, Welsh Musician

Reading, Writing

"A great book should leave you with many experiences, and slightly exhausted. You should live several lives while reading it."

William Styron, American Novelist

"Reading a book is like re-writing it for yourself. You bring to a novel, anything you read, all your experience of the world. You bring your history and you read it in your own terms."

Angela Carter, English Novelist

Reading, Experience, History, World

"From reading a previous answer, you know that I consider all those aspects to be part of American cultural myth and thus they figure into good American poetry, whether the poet is aware of what he is doing or not."

Diane Wakoski, American Poet

Reading, Poetry, Myth

"CNN is a more diverse brand. It's spread out over more products over there."

Brit Hume, American Journalist

"We judge ourselves by what we feel capable of doing, while others judge us by what we have already done."

Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, American Poet

"Here we have been sitting down for a brief moment and you are already asking me if there are pictures of me in my drawers."

Anthony Weiner, American Politician

"You must pay for your sins. If you have already paid, please ignore this notice."

Sam Levenson, American Author

"Reading maketh a full man; conference a ready man; and writing an exact man."

Francis Bacon, English Philosopher

Reading, Man, Writing

"But with comics you're reading and assimilating an image simultaneously, instead of just reading or watching the tube."

Bill Sienkiewicz, American Artist

"Romances I ne'er read like those I have seen."

George Byron, Scottish Poet

"It seems to me that readers sometimes make the genesis of a poem more mysterious than it is (by that I perhaps mean, think of it as something outside their own experience)."

James Schuyler, American Poet

"It was an incredible resource. I'd sit with a big stack of bound New Yorkers in the library and read through, especially the 'Talk of the Town' sections."

Michael Chabon, American Author

"I remember when I was in my late teens just getting rid of lots of records, realizing I only ever listened to them when I was reading, or watching TV, or doing something else."

Jonny Greenwood, English Musician

"The decision to write in prose instead of poetry is made more by the readers than by writers. Almost no one is interested in reading narrative in verse."

Robert Morgan, American Soldier

Reading, Poetry, Decision, Prose

"We're not gonna misread our mandate."

Mitch McConnell, American Politician

"I have never known any distress that an hour's reading did not relieve."

Charles de Montesquieu, French Philosopher

"I think there is a great difference, in that when the poet is reading you get the whole personality of the person, especially if he's a good reader. Whereas a person just sitting gets what he puts into it."

James Laughlin, American Poet

Reading, Difference, Personality

"I began reading science fiction before I was 12 and started writing science fiction around the same time."

Octavia Butler, American Writer

Reading, Science, Time, Fiction

"Between 2 and 5 I'm reading in to find out what's been going on while I've been asleep."

Bob Edwards, American Journalist

"In this eventful period the colony of New South Wales is already far advanced."

Charles Sturt, Australian Explorer

bottom of page