Andrew Lang Quotes

The most important thing for any aspiring writer, is to read! And not just the sort of thing you're trying to write, be that fantasy, SF, comic books, whatever. You need to read everything.

Writers are voracious readers. Once I unlocked the mystery of the alphabet that led to words, a multitude of words connecting me to the world, there was no stopping me. Everything was fair game, from Louisa May Alcott to my older cousin's True Romance Magazines, from Lewis Carroll to the backs of cereal boxes. All of this fed me, but it took certain books to make me grow. I don't want to work without a sense of drama, without passion, or without both eyes open to the world around me.

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.

When I was a kid and a young man I read everything. When I was about 23, I was incredibly lucky in that I wound up with several book review columns, which meant that I had to read huge amounts of stuff that was outside my experience and outside my comfort zone. I think every young writer should be forced to read the kind of stuff they would not normally read for pleasure.

The greatest gift is a passion for reading.

I love books so much. I've read more books than anyone else I know.

I loved to read, still do, and it seemed that the writing was a result of the love of books and reading and libraries.

There isn't an aspect of book creation I don't enjoy, and there has always been a book in my life to dream about or work on.

I always individuate myself from other writers who say they would die if they couldn't write. For me, I'd die if I couldn't read.

Couldn't imagine any other way of living, outside of books, outside my work. Which doesn't mean I am not interested in other things, of course - I am interested in many things. But the center, the crux, is always literature.

I love books. Probably too much for my own good.

My passion for books has changed my life.

I think I write in order to discover on my shelf a new book that I would enjoy reading, or to see a new play that would engross me.

I don't love reading so much, but I love book shopping. It's just because I don't have much time.

It had been startling and disappointing to me to find out that story books had been written by people, that books were not natural wonders, coming up of themselves like grass. Yet regardless of where they come from, I cannot remember a time when I was not in love with them - with the books themselves, cover and binding and the paper they were printed on, with their smell and their weight and with their possession in my arms, captured and carried off to myself. Still illiterate, I was ready for them, committed to all the reading I could give them.

Basbanes makes you love books.

I wanted to pull down a book, open it proper, and gobble up page after page

To a bibliophile, there is but one thing better than a box of new books, and that is a box of old ones.

You take the books, you lie there in the pools of light and you drink life. That is how intensely I have loved libraries.

I think, oh my god, kids are reading, and they care about a book enough to come over and talk to me about a book that they care about. If I think about it as being a celebrity, it would freak me out. But I just think, lucky me, that I get to be a part of this whole thing.

Picking five favorite books is like picking the five body parts you'd most like not to lose.

I am simply a book drunkard.

I have always been reconciled to the fact that I was born a bibliomaniac, never have I sought a cure, and my dearest friends have been drawn from those likewise suffering from book madness.

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

Read everything. Read fiction and non-fiction, read hot best sellers and the classics you never got around to in college.