Top 1200 Great Reading Quotes & Sayings

Teenagers are always sneaking around in drawers where they shouldn't go and reading things they shouldn't be reading. And that's an attempt to try, I think, to penetrate, that's how I found out as a teenager what was going on, was by sneaking into drawers and reading letters that I had no business reading.

The conversation with the dead is one of the great pleasures of life. Somebody who is sitting reading Chekhov, Beckett, reading Toni Morrison - you are not in any way dead, in many ways you are intensely alive.

Reading for experience is the only reading that justifies excitement. Reading for facts is necessary bu the less said about it in public the better. Reading for distraction is like taking medicine. We do it, but it is nothing to be proud of. But reading for experience is transforming.

I grew up in this household where reading was the most noble thing you could do. When I was a teenager, we would have family dinners where we all sat there reading. It wasn't because we didn't like each other. We just liked reading. The person who made my reading list until my late teen years was my mom.

I didn't ever consider poetry the province exclusively of English and American literature and I discovered a great amount in reading Polish poetry and other Eastern European poetry and reading Russian poetry and reading Latin American and Spanish poetry and I've always found models in those other poetries of poets who could help me on my path.

Reading poetry and reading the great works of the canon that we were reading in the '60s and the '70s and '80s was mind altering.

One of the great pleasures of reading Tom Wolfe - of still reading Tom Wolfe - is the sense of awe he consistently inspires.

Reading takes me to a different place than my everyday life. I usually get fully involved in what I'm reading about, so it's a great escape.

What do teachers and curriculum directors mean by 'value' reading? A look at the practice of most schools suggests that when a school 'values' reading what it really means is that the school intensely focuses on raising state-mandated reading test scores- the kind of reading our students will rarely, if ever, do in adulthood.

Reading is the best return on investment. You have to live your entire life in order to know one life. But with reading you can know 1000s of people's lives for almost no cost. What a great return!

Reading is the gateway to so many things that helps makes it possible for seven billion people to live together on one planet. Literature is the great extra-somatic keeper of our knowledge of what it is to be human. Reading elevates us. We read to be our best selves.

The great opposition to reading is what I allow to fill my time instead of reading. To say we have no time to read is not really true; we simply have chosen to use our time for other things, or have allowed our time to be filled to the exclusion of reading. So don't add reading to your to-do list. Just stop doing the things that keep you from doing it. But read.

For the last episode [of Downton Abbey], you'll need some handkerchiefs. I needed handkerchiefs reading it. It wasn't because it necessarily moved me while reading it, but it was the experience of reading it when I realized it was the last time I was ever going to be reading one of those scripts. That was quite terminal.

Each weekday morning, I'm up - reading, reading, reading.

Reading is dreaming. Reading is entering a world of imagination shared between reader and author. Reading is getting beyond the words to the story or meaning underneath.

The art of not reading is a very important one. It consists in not taking an interest in whatever may be engaging the attention of the general public at any particular time. When some political or ecclesiastical pamphlet, or novel, or poem is making a great commotion, you should remember that he who writes for fools always finds a large public. A precondition for reading good books is not reading bad ones: for life is short.

You know how it is when you're reading a book and falling asleep, you're reading, reading... and all of a sudden you notice your eyes are closed? I'm like that all the time.

A lot of times, you're not necessarily off the page because you haven't been able to take the time to prepare a character. It's very easy to find even great actors reading it more like a reading. Things aren't really coming alive yet, even though you know they will.

Only by painting the great panorama of history, can the great history-reading public be entertained or satisfied.

I have a great deal of sympathy for reluctant readers because I was one. I would do anything to avoid reading. In my case, it wasn't until I was 13 and discovered the 'Lord of the Rings' that I learned to love reading.

When I was young, there was no such thing as YA. You simply went from reading children's novels to reading adult novels. So one year, I was reading Tove Jansson, and the next year, I was reading Stephen King.

Reading changes your life. Reading unlocks worlds unknown or forgotten, taking travelers around the world and through time. Reading helps you escape the confines of school and pursue your own education. Through characters - the saints and the sinners, real or imagined - reading shows you how to be a better human being.

I'm bringing reading back. I'm making reading great again!

We shouldn't teach great books; we should teach a love of reading. Knowing the contents of a few works of literature is a trivial achievement. Being inclined to go on reading is a great achievement.

If you re-read your work, you can find on re-reading a great deal of repetition can be avoided by re-reading and editing.

The great thing about reading for Quentin [Tarantino] is you're not reading for him, he's reading with you. So he sits right next to you.

It is not the reading of many books which is necessary to make a man wise or good, but the well-reading of a few, could he be sure to have the best. And it is not possible to read over many on the same subject without a great deal of loss of precious time.

Mobile is great for us. I think, even though the size of the screen doesn't give everything The New Yorker has to offer, people are spending a lot of time reading - and reading seriously - on the phone.

While reading writers of great formulatory power — Henry James, Santayana, Proust — I find I can scarcely get through a page without having to stop to record some lapidary sentence. Reading Henry James, for example, I have muttered to myself, "C’mon, Henry, turn down the brilliance a notch, so I can get some reading done." I may be one of a very small number of people who have developed writer’s cramp while reading.

There are two kinds of reading, reading which is contemplation - even a kind of vision & reading for information. For the first only the best will do, for the rest - then one can let in anything one would like to read in the world.

The city of Morrow needs good leadership today and in the future years. I enjoy reading and learning from established leaders. Reading quotes is a great way to learn as they contain rich nuggets of knowledge.

[B]riefing is not reading. In fact it is the antithesis of reading. Briefing is terse, factual and to the point. Reading is untidy, discursive and perpetually inviting. Briefing closes down a subject, reading opens it up.

Well meaning adults can easily destroy a child's love of reading - do not discourage children from reading because you feel they're reading the wrong thing. There is no such thing as the wrong thing to be reading and no bad fiction for kids.

Great readers, great listeners, and all have great work ethics. ... They work hard at what they do and they're devout to their reading and listening.

I read continually and don't understand writers who say they don't read while working on a book. For a start, a book takes me about two years to write, so there's no way I am depriving myself of reading during that time. Another thing is that reading other writers is continually inspiring - reading great writers reminds you how hard you have to work.

One thing that brings me great, great joy is reading the reviews of 'Civil War' and seeing the much deserved credit that Chris Evans is getting for his performance as Captain America.

You never know what you're in for when you take a role. When you're reading the script, you're in some café in New York and you're loving life and it sounds great because it's like reading a book. When you step into that book and you actually have to play it out, for real, it's a totally different ball game.

There's a remarkable power about reading together, reading collectively, that's brought out by reading groups.

I love poetry; it's my primary literary interest, and I suppose the kind of reading you do when you are reading poems - close reading - can carry over into how you read other things.

I think reading a room - reading the personalities, reading body language - is kind of a lost art.

Literature has done great work for feminism - writing and reading are a practice of empathy - and great literature will continue to do so.

If Brideshead Revisited is not a great book, it's so like a great book that many of us, at least while reading it, find it hard to tell the difference.

Reading has always been my home, my sustenance, my great invincible companion. "Book love," Trollope called it. "It will make your hours pleasant to you as long as you live." Yet of all the many things in which we recognize some universal comfort...reading seems to be the one in which the comfort is most undersung.

When you read something, and especially when you're reading compellingly great, that becomes part of your identity, at least while you're reading it. You become changed by reading it.

I think instead writers and publishers and readers need to go to the places where people are, and make the argument that there is great value to the quiet, contemplative process of reading a novel, that reading great books carefully offers pleasures and consolations that no iPad app ever can.

An acquaintanceship with the literature of the world may be won by any person who will devote half an hour a day to the careful reading of the best books. The habit of reading good books is one that gives great comfort in all the stages and among all the vicissitudes of life. The man who has learned to love good reading is never alone. His friends are the great ones of human history, and to them he may always go for stimulating and helpful communion. -GQ 71

Before I was reading science fiction, I read Hemingway. Farewell to Arms was my first adult novel that said not everything ends well. It was one of those times where reading has meant a great deal to me, in terms of my development - an insight came from that book.

When I'm sitting in my hotel room, I'm reading. If I've got some time after class, I'm reading. If I can get away with it while I'm doing treatment, I'm reading.

Reading aloud is the best advertisement because it works. It allows a child to sample the delights of reading and conditions him to believe that reading is a pleasureful experience, not a painful or boring one.

All reading is good reading. And all reading of Jane Austen and Charles Dickens is sublime reading.

Nobody knows that in reading we are re-living our temptations to be a poet. All readers who have a certain passion for reading, nurture and repress, through reading, the desire to become a writer.

Reading is everything. Reading makes me feel like I've accomplished something, learned something, become a better person. Reading makes me smarter. Reading gives me something to talk about later on. Reading is the unbelievably healthy way my attention deficit disorder medicates itself. Reading is escape, and the opposite of escape; it's a way to make contact with reality after a day of making things up, and it's a way of making contact with someone else's imagination after a day that's all too real. Reading is grist. Reading is bliss.

My personal view is that reading has to be balanced. Obviously, there's a certain amount of reading that we have to do academically to continue to learn and to grow, but it's got to be balanced with fun and with elective reading. Whether that's comic books or Jane Austen, if it makes you excited about reading, that's what matters.

I was not a great student at the University of Chicago. I think that is - the record will bare me out. But I spent a lot of time reading history, sociology, psychology - reading everything except what I was supposed to read for class the next day.

Anyone who grows up reading the Bible for spiritual reasons, you get accustomed to reading things that are too much for you, too profound for you... Having that belief that you should read them anyway gives you a great advantage over people who only read what they think they can understand.

I think it's a great thing to hear the author reading. I've listened to CDs of Cheever and Updike reading their stories and Hemingway. To hear what their voices were like is amazing. Whether they're reading well or not, it's great to listen to the intonation and the beat of the guy who wrote the story.

Reading usually precedes writing. And the impulse to write is almost always fired by reading. Reading, the love of reading, is what makes you dream of becoming a writer.

Reading with an eye towards metaphor allows us to become the person we’re reading about, while reading about them. That’s why there is symbols in books and why your English teacher deserves your attention. Ultimately, it doesn’t matter if the author intended the symbol to be there because the job of reading is not to understand the author’s intent. The job of reading is to use stories as a way into seeing other people as a we ourselves.

I like reading. I prefer not reading on my computer, because that makes whatever I am reading feel like work. I do not mind reading on my iPad.

I love reading any interesting book. If it is boring I keep it forever after reading 4-5 pages of it. But if it is good, I can go on reading it no matter what genre it belongs to.