Philip Roth Quotes

The library of my elementary school had this great biography section, and I read all of these paperback biographies until they were dog-eared. The story of Eleanor Roosevelt and Madame Curie and Martin Luther King and George Washington Carver and on and on and on.

I grew up in a household without a TV. We lived next door to a library for a while, and at one point, I checked out all the books in the fairy tale section. I remember the librarian's quiet smile as I'd bring back one stack and exchange it for another.

Now that I'm taking some time off from school, I've been reading a lot to make sure I don't forget everything. It's mostly classics and nonfiction accounts from actors, directors and writers from the '40s and '50s.

I read more books for research purposes, whether it's a fictionalized biography of Johannes Gutenberg or a stack of urban fantasies.

I read a lot as a kid and in high school.

I think that's not a question that one can answer accurately. I read a whole range of books, quite a lot of history at the time, and still do read a lot. I read very widely.

My love of literature goes back to my childhood.

I love watching old movies, and I read a lot of autobiographies.

I was a reader as a child, believe it or not.

I was a mess-up in school, a big mess-up. I was into history and English, because there were always stories, like 'Dracula' and World War II. I've never read a book, though. Never.

When I was growing up, I remember having read all the books in the library. I often tried to emulate my favourite writers.

I was a good boy in high school, and I read for English class, and I vaguely remember reading, as a kid, 'Choose Your Own Adventure' stuff, but I didn't really read for pleasure.

Seeing that we were book enthusiasts, my mother began hauling my sister and me down to the Stanton Free Library on Tuesday afternoons, where I'd find two or three books to bring home.

The child realizes to every man his own earliest remembrance, and so supplies a defect in our education, or enables us to live over the unconscious history with a sympathy so tender as to be almost personal experience.

I didn't read comics as a kid - though, obviously, I've read a lot since.

I read a lot of 'The Canterbury Tales' on my phone last year, because I was cycling between three different editions, and I needed to have a middle-of-the-night edition for the insomniac reading.

My father gave me free run of his library. When I think of my boyhood, I think in terms of the books I read.

I read hungrily and delightedly, and have realized since that you can’t write unless you read.

Read a lot, write a lot is the great commandment.

I'm just writing what I know. I've never been much of a reader of fantasy, and I think you write what you, personally, enjoy reading.

Some people may contend that there is no image more charming that a child holding a puppy or kitten. But for me that's a distant second. When I see a child clutching a book... to his or her tiny bosom, I'm moved. Children can possess a book in a way they can never possess a video game, a TV show, or a Darth Vader doll. A book comes alive when they read it. They give it life themselves by understanding it.

Ordinary people have big TVs. Extraordinary people have big libraries.

I was very aware of the fact that there are a lot of comics out there that I love, because I've grown up my whole life reading comics and I know every little nuance of the language and all the implications.

She is too fond of books, and it has turned her brain.

So many times, I will have people tell me what I did when I was younger. There's so much being written [about] the early Beatles period, and even pre-Beatles period. And people will say, "Oh, he did that because that, and that happened because of that." And I'll be reading and think, "Well, that didn't happen" and, "That's not why I did that." Like anyone's history, you remember what went down better than people who weren't there.