extensive reading Quotes

We possess the Canon because we are mortal and also rather belated. There is only so much time, and time must have a stop, while there is more to read than there ever was before. From the Yahwist and Homer to Freud, Kafka, and Beckett is a journey of nearly three millennia. Since that voyage goes past harbors as infinite as Dante, Chaucer, Montaigne, Shakespeare, and Tolstoy, all of whom amply compensate a lifetime's rereadings, we are in the pragmatic dilemma of excluding something else each time we read or reread extensively.

Does there, I wonder, exist a being who has read all, or approximately all, that the person of average culture is supposed to have read, and that not to have read is a social sin? If such a being does exist, surely he is an old, a very old man.

And to all this she must yet add something more substantial, in the improvement of her mind by extensive reading.

For twenty years I read a book a day, from the time I was seven until I was twenty-seven.

These are just the tip of the iceberg, because I read and read and read. I read everything.

I've loved science fiction ever since I was a little kid, mainly from looking at the covers of science-fiction magazines and books, and I've read quite extensively as an adult.

Read much, but not many books.

I've probably read more bad science fiction than anyone else alive. But I've also read more good science fiction than anyone else alive.

I basically read every book ever written about Marilyn Monroe.

Before you can become a writer, you have to be a reader, and a reader of everything, at that. To the best of my recollection, I became a reader at the age of 10 and have never stopped. Like many authors, I read all sorts of books all the time, and it is amazing how the mind fills up.

If you don't feel that you haven't read enough, you haven't read enough.

I think that's not a question that one can answer accurately. I read a whole range of books, quite a lot of history at the time, and still do read a lot. I read very widely.

The literature from which I come is rather large.

I went to Europe three times, I read dozens and dozens of books, I studied thousands of photos. But I always supplemented that research with imagination; research might give you detail, but imagination supplies the direction in which to apply all that detail.

I finished 1,100 books in six weeks.

I read a lot, but at the same time I'm not a particularly good or diligent or discriminating reader. I go through maybe close to a thousand or more books a year, but a lot of times I'll only read bits and pieces of any one individual text.

Develop craftsmanship through years of wide reading.

I mean, if we're concerned genuinely with writing, I think we probably get on with our work. I think this is very true of English writers, but perhaps not so true of French writers, who seem to read each other passionately, extensively, and endlessly, and who then talk about it to each other - which is splendid.

Sylvie's knowledge, like Izzie's, was random yet far-ranging, 'The sign that one has acquired one's learning from reading novels rather than an education.