Joe R. Lansdale Quotes

When I was a kid, I went through the whole process of reading great literature and trying to be very widely read.

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.

I was fantastically well versed by the time I left school. I had a teacher who put 'A Clockwork Orange' my way, and 'Catcher in the Rye.'

What fascinated me mostly about Mickey Cohen was that he, in his later years, hired someone to help him to comprehend literature, to help him to read better, to understand words better.

As a reader, I read quite widely.

The trouble is when people read about authors, they don't feel compelled to read the authors' work.

When I first began to combine letters other than Hebrew, I read every book in German that came my way, and from these I certainly received according to the nature of my soul.

I read Shakespeare when I was 14 because it's what we were taught.

In 1978, when I was 17 and in my first year at university, I read approximately 3,500 pages of Dickens.

When a new book is published, read an old one.

Literature has been part of my life for as long as I can remember. I can't think back before a time that I didn't love writing and reading. When I was really young, my mother would read poems to me. I loved Edgar Allan Poe - I am sure I didn't understand it, but I loved it.

College isn't the only answer. Reading is a college that you can and should attend all your life.

I grew up reading Shakespeare and Mark Twain.

Books guided my life from high school, and the greatest, most interesting, most provocative, funniest, smartest people who ever lived in the last 200 or 300 years wrote those books. I would fall in love with Victor Hugo and read not just 'Les Miserables,' but 'Bug-Jargal' and 'The Toilers of the Sea' and so forth.

I read the Bible to myself; I'll take any translation, any edition, and read it aloud, just to hear the language, hear the rhythm, and remind myself how beautiful English is.

I read over a hundred books a year and have done so since I was fifteen years old, and every book I've read has taught me something.

I've always loved words. I ate up all the books I could get my hands on, and when I couldn't get books, I read candy wrappers and labels on cereal and toothpaste boxes.

You become a reader by reading the literature, not by reading the handbooks about it.

My mother had been a Latin teacher, and she was always very fascinated with words. She and I shared books and responded to them.

All attempts at gaining literary polish must begin with judicious reading, and the learner must never cease to hold this phase uppermost. In many cases, the usage of good authors will be found a more effective guide than any amount of precept.

I read all the time, and I'm often struck by something I'm reading.

My whole background was in voracious book-reading.

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

Between the ages of fifteen and twenty-four, I must have read a whole library.

I really liked English literature, a subject I did really well at.