Jacqueline Woodson Quotes

I've found that writers who don't read really can't write.

To be a good editor or a good writer, I think you really need to be a great reader first.

An active and creative reader is a re-reader.

I really think that reading is just as important as writing when you're trying to be a writer because it's the only apprenticeship we have, it's the only way of learning how to write a story.

Some books are to be tasted, others to be swallowed, and some few to be chewed and digested.

I read part of it all the way through.

I like writing books. I really love words. I love to read.

The greatest part of a writer's time is spent in reading in order to write. A man will turn over half a library to make a book.

I loved to read, still do, and it seemed that the writing was a result of the love of books and reading and libraries.

I wanted to become a writer. I enjoyed reading as a child.

Read a lot. Read broadly... Tell stories to your friends, and pay attention to when they get bored... Write a lot.

Authors like reading. Go figure. So it's not surprising that we sometimes bog down in the research stage of new writing projects.

I've always been a reader and a writer.

I think the reason I'm a writer is because first, I was a reader. I loved to read. I read a lot of adventure stories and mystery books, and I have wonderful memories of my mom reading picture books aloud to me. I learned that words are powerful.

I love reading almost as much as I love writing.

I don't know what else teaches you as much as writing. Perhaps reading. So if I don't have one or the other in the course of the day, I feel old.

I think writing and reading are completely synergistic; not necessarily in that one has to be a good reader to be a good writer or vice versa, but that they so inform each other.

We're not just writers; we're readers probably more than anything else. That's how you learn how to write and how you learn to appreciate good writing: by reading.

Good readers make much out of little.

Teaching literature is teaching how to read. How to notice things in a text that a speed-reading culture is trained to disregard, overcome, edit out, or explain away; how to read what the language is doing, not guess what the author was thinking; how to take evidence from a page, not seek a reality to substitute for it.

The most common mistake students of literature make is to go straight for what the poem or novel says, setting aside the way that it says it. To read like this is to set aside the ‘literariness’ of the work – the fact that it is a poem or play or novel, rather than an account of the incidence of soil erosion in Nebraska.

Becoming a writer can kind of spoil your reading because you kind of read on tracks. You're reading as someone who wants to enjoy the book but also, as a writer, noticing the techniques that the writer uses and especially the ones that make you want to turn the page to see what happened.

In reading, one should notice and fondle details.

For me, reading books and writing them are tied together. The words of other writers teach me and refresh me and inspire me.

Listen you have to read a book three times before you know it.