Ralph Waldo Emerson Quotes

I think that good writing is based on good reading. Maybe it's not about writing today, maybe it's about reading today. Maybe it's about finding the sort of book you would never read.

Being a librarian certainly helped me with my writing because it made me even more of a reader, and I was always an enthusiastic reader. Writing and reading seem to me to be different aspects of a single imaginative act.

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

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.

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.

Read as much as you can, and then sit down and write.

I believe that writing is derivative. I think good writing comes from good reading.

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

One can't write without having read - you have to read before beginning to write - and universities offer a very good opportunity to read.

I take a real interest in the possibilities of teaching - including the practice of bringing creative writing, and serious reading, into the classroom. I am persuaded that since language is alive, much of the challenge has already been met by the poets and novelists we read.

Only a reader can become a writer. Develop a lively intellect and the ability to become interested in anything, no matter how mundane it might seem at first. Look for the story. Develop an eye for detail. Feed your mind and your brain: learn as much as you can about everything you can.

Since I make my living as a literary journalist, not a book scout, I spend inordinate amounts of time either reading or writing.

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.

No book, however good, can survive a hostile reading.

In the past few years I've assigned books to be read before a student attends one of my weeklong seminars. I have been astonished by how few people -- people who supposedly want to write -- read books, and if they read them, how little they examine them.

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.

It is my contention that the process of reading is part of the process of writing, the necessary completion without which writing can hardly be said to exist.

a good reader makes a good book

I guess the important thing for young writers is to read.

We read often with as much talent as we write.

Read like mad. But try to do it analytically - which can be hard, because the better and more compelling a novel is, the less conscious you will be of its devices. It's worth trying to figure those devices out, however: they might come in useful in your own work.

Writing and reading is to me synonymous with existing.

In fact, one of the things that I really love about literary fiction is that it's one of the few kinds of writing that doesn't tell us what to think or what to buy or what to wear. We're surrounded by advertising.