Erich Fromm Quotes

I think technique can be taught but I think the only way to learn to write is to read, and I see writing and reading as completely related. One almost couldn't exist without the other.

It's just a matter of me opening up the page and whatever is written on the page, that's what I'm here to do.

When I was a small kid, I grew up in the newspapers.

Reading taught me how to write.

To me, letters have always been a robust medium of sublimation. I don't remember what I was like before I learned my ABC's, but for as long as I can remember I have made them with my fingers and felt them in my bones.

If you haven't read you don't have the voice. The lack of voice eliminates experience.

This will never be a civilized country until we spend more money for books than we do for chewing gum.

If I don't have words, it's a sign I'm not reading enough.

I think that one possible definition of our modern culture is that it is one in which nine-tenths of our intellectuals can't read any poetry.

There's something magical about the idea that you can write something down and someone else can read it. I'm still mildly agog about that.

A reading man and woman is a ready man and woman, but a writing man and woman is exact.

I started writing as soon as I started reading.

What is reading, but silent conversation.

Once you've got a child to the point that they've discovered books, they're safe. There's a world of the imagination that when they're hurt or upset, they can move into, and it is wonderful.

I love to read. But I loved to read a lot longer than I started to love writing.

All my life I've looked at words as though I were seeing them for the first time.

So completely had learning decayed in England that there were very few men on this side of the Humber who could apprehend their services in English or even translate a letter from Latin to English... There were so few of them that I cannot recollect a single one South of the Thames when I succeeded to the kingdom.

Anyone who doesn't read doesn't have any business writing.

If you took my reading and writing out of my head, I don't know who I would be.

Reading is a bridge to thought.

While we pay lip service to the virtues of reading, the truth is that there is still in our culture something that suspects those who read too much, whatever reading too much means, of being lazy, aimless dreamers, people who need to grow up and come outside to where real life is, who think themselves superior in their separateness.

This life is slow suicide, unless you read.

When we learn to read, it's a real product of civilization and a civilized society. It affects your brain. It affects the way you think, and it gives you that capacity for self-reflection that you simply do not have without the agency of books.

All my life I have been trying to learn to read, to see and hear, and to write.

Books are like truth serum-- if you don't read, you can't figure out what's real.