Barbara Johnson Quotes

I read part of it all the way through.

He taught me literature, and he actually taught me how to read. He was my personal mentor.

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.

We are now in want of an art to teach how books are to be read rather than to read them. Such an art is practicable.

Failure to grasp centrifugal meaning is incomplete reading; failure to grasp centripetal meaning is incompetent reading.

In reading, one should notice and fondle details.

It's good to know how to read, but it's dangerous to know how to read and not how to interpret what you're reading.

I think I learned a lot from reading in general - even from reading badly written books.

I'm an old English major from way back, so I do have fun tearing apart texts and trying to find the hidden secrets and the subtexts in there.

It might be an idea for all literary critics to read the books they analyse aloud - it certainly helps to fix them in the mind, while providing a readymade seminar with your audience.

The answers you get from literature depend on the questions you pose.

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.

There are books that are made for you to sit and puzzle over and spend time with.

Good readers make much out of little.

Some people spend their entire lives reading but never get beyond reading the words on the page, they don't understand that the words are merely stepping stones placed across a fast-flowing river, and the reason they're there is so that we can reach the farther shore, it's the other side that matters...

For heaven's sake, don't write writing. Write reading!

…she was discovering once again that reading and writing were not the same — you couldn't just soak it up then squeeze it out again.

Learning how to be a good reader is what makes you a writer.

We have not read an author till we have seen his object, whatever it may be, as he saw it.

From a really young age, I was reading like a writer. I was reading for the deep understanding of the literature; not simply to hear the story but to understand how the author got the story on the page.

We can all learn from every text. Reading the work that disgusts you can only strengthen your core beliefs. I could teach a semester-long course based only on reading the local telephone book. All stories can be taught in valuable ways.

Besides, rereading, not reading, is what counts.

Those who fail to reread are obliged to read the same story everywhere.

There is an art of reading, an art of thinking, and an art of writing.

Close reading of tough-minded writing is still the best, cheapest, and quickest method known for learning to think for yourself... Reading, and rigorous discussion of that reading in a way that obliges you to formulate a position and support it against objections, is an operational definition of education... reading, analysis, and discussion is the way we develop reliable judgment, the principle way we come to penetrate covert movements behind the facade of public appearances.