Randall Jarrell Quotes

But then anyone who's worth anything reads just what he likes, as the mood takes him, and with extravagant enthusiasm.

I sometimes get tired because I can seldom read a book for pleasure. I'm like the play reviewer who happens to go to a play on an off day and can't help but view it critically.

I used to take five or six books away and bring five or six books back. Nobody gave me direction or advice and I read much in the way that a boy might watch television.

I think sometimes parents and teachers can push children away from reading by telling them it's something they must do, the same way they must eat their greens and must pass their exams in school. Poppycock! Read or don't read - that's your call.

I read for pleasure and that is the moment I learn the most.

I find that nowadays it's just gotten harder for me to read for fun. It feels like all of my reading is research-based.

I don't want to review books any more. It cuts in too much on my reading.

Grown-ups shouldn’t finish books they’re not enjoying. When you’re no longer a child, and you no longer live at home, you don’t have to finish everything on your plate. One reward of leaving school is that you don’t have to finish books you don’t like.

My mother read secondarily for information; she sank as a hedonist into novels. She read Dickens in the spirit in which she would have eloped with him.

There is only one way to read, which is to browse in libraries and bookshops, picking up books that attract you, reading only those, dropping them when they bore you, skipping the parts that drag-and never, never reading anything because you feel you ought, or because it is part of a trend or a movement. Remember that the book which bores you when you are twenty or thirty will open doors for you when you are forty or fifty-and vise versa. Don’t read a book out of its right time for you.

This is not about money or anything other than the pleasure of reading for people who want to read it.

Some people read books for fun.

All reading for pleasure is entertainment.

Reader's Bill of Rights 1. The right to not read 2. The right to skip pages 3. The right to not finish 4. The right to reread 5. The right to read anything 6. The right to escapism 7. The right to read anywhere 8. The right to browse 9. The right to read out loud 10. The right to not defend your tastes

I happen to think that a book is of extraordinary value if it gives the reader nothing more than a smile or two. It's perfectly okay to take a book, read it, have a good time, giggle and laugh - and turn off the TV. I love that.

There is a temperate zone in the mind, between luxurious indolence and exacting work; and it is to this region, just between laziness and labor, that summer reading belongs.

And you love to read, you love to escape, right?

The time to read is any time: no apparatus, no appointment of time and place, is necessary.

I read books, but I do it because I want to - because it's like an escape in my head, like being with you.

I read only to please myself, and enjoy only what suits my taste.

One reads for pleasure...it is not a public duty.

Every time people force themselves to carry on with a book they're not enjoying, they reinforce the idea that reading is a duty.

To encounter a fine book and have time to read it is a wonderful thing.

After a while, if you are sufficiently bored or unemployed, you may want to read it from cover to cover.

As a rule I had a distaste for any reading beyond my school books.