Ralph Waldo Emerson Quotes

a good reader makes a good book

We shouldn't teach great books; we should teach a love of reading.

I'm ashamed to admit this, but I didn't read a novel all the way through until after high school. Blasphemy, I know. I'm an author now. Books and words are my world.

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.

When someone says to me, 'I love your book - I read it in a day,' I want to tell them to go back and read it again.

The whole purpose of books is that we read them, and if you find you can't, it might not be your inadequacy that's to blame. 'Good' books can be pretty awful sometimes.

I'm actually not that big a fan of reading.

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

Ideally, we should like to define a good book as one which 'permits, invites, or compels' good reading

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

People don't understand how hard it is to get recognized, how hard it is to get people to read your books. How hard it is to get people to even to understand what they're reading when they're talking to you about their books.

A capacity, and taste, for reading gives access to whatever has already been discovered by others.

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

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

Reading should be a repeat performance.

The man who does not read good books has no advantage over the man who cannot read them.

It is important to be well read, at least a little bit.

The most important thing is to read as much as you can, like I did. It will give you an understanding of what makes good writing and it will enlarge your vocabulary.

I still believe that sitting down and reading a book is the best way to really learn something.

I had started to feel that somewhere in the second half of the 20th century, the idea of page-turning as a good thing had been lost. You were getting books that were the equivalent of absolutely beautifully prepared dishes of food that didn't taste like anything much.

What we become depends on what we read after all of the professors have finished with us. The greatest university of all is a collection of books.

We live in a moment and a culture when reading is really endangered. There's simply no way to write well, though, if you're not reading well.

Books give not wisdom where none was before. But where some is, there reading makes it more.

The best way to enhance a child's imagination is to make them read.

When I was little, I thought everyone in the world liked to read because it was so fun. But then I realised that was not exactly true. I want other kids to read and write more all over the world, because it helps them to understand things better.