A Quote by Terry Teachout

Nobody reads a reference book to be amused, much less charmed.

Terry Teachout

Quote Topics

Amused Book Charmed Less Much Nobody Reads Reference

Quote Author

Terry Teachout
American - Critic
Born: February 6, 1956

Nobody reads a book to get to the middle.

Mickey Spillane

There was reference made to a book written in Greek by a former Rabbi who had been converted to Christianity. There was reference to a publication of a high clergyman of Milan. Not even did Jews raise objections to that book.

Julius Streicher

Nobody reads a mystery to get to the middle. They read it to get to the end. If it's a letdown, they won't buy anymore. The first page sells that book. The last page sells your next book.

Mickey Spillane

No one ever reads a book. He reads himself through books.

Romain Rolland

If one reads enough books one has a fighting chance. Or better, one's chances of survival increase with each book one reads.

Sherman Alexie

You and me will read a book and find three interesting things that we remember. But Colin finds everything intriguing. He reads a book about presidents and he remembers more of it because everything he reads clicks in his head as fugging interesting.

John Green

The parent reads the book. The kid reads the book and then they can talk about the characters instead of talking about themselves. You know there's a connection even if you don't talk about it when you read the same books.

Judy Blume

...the Bible itself is less read than preached, less interpreted than brandished. Increasingly, pastors may drape a limply bound Book over the edges of the pulpit as they depart from it. Members of the congregation carry Bibles to church services; the paster announces a long passage text for his sermon and waits for people to find it, then reads only the first verse of it before he takes off. The Book has become a talisman.

Harold Bloom

A book is judged, not by its reference to life, but by its reference to other books.

Stephen Fry

I'm no longer religious, but the Bible fascinates me. Hardly anyone reads it anymore, but it's got everything: it's a book of poetry, it's a book of principle, it's a book of stories, and of myths and of epic tales, a book of histories and a book of fictions, of riddles, fables, parables and allegories.

Tara Westover

I should have been a much better artist if I could have studied more and amused myself less.

Ida Rentoul Outhwaite

You know that fiction, prose rather, is possibly the roughest trade of all in writing. You do not have the reference, the old important reference. You have the sheet of blank paper, the pencil, and the obligation to invent truer than things can be true. You have to take what is not palpable and make it completely palpable and also have it seem normal and so that it can become a part of experience of the person who reads it.

Ernest Hemingway

Walden is the only book I own, although there are some others unclaimed on my shelves. Every man, I think, reads one book in his life, and this is mine. It is not the best book I ever encountered, perhaps, but it is for me the handiest, and I keep it about me in much the same way one carries a handkerchief - for relief in moments of defluxion or despair.

E. B. White

"The Diagnosis" is by far my most ambitious book. I such great hopes for it... there was so much I wanted to do with the book. I was extremely insecure about it for several years. Just didn't know whether I would finish the book much less for it to come close to what I intended. I think that for any novel you never know exactly how the book is going to turn out...