I'm a slow reader, but I usually get through seventy or eighty books a year, most fiction. I don't read in order to study the craft; I read because I like to read
If we were meant to read for enjoyment, would God have created television? Read as it was intended - for exercise. The more you read, the more you expand your - what's the word I'm looking for? - your stockpile of words. You must have a stockpile of words that you can pass along to your children for their stockpile.
... we must read, not only for what we read but for what it makes us think.
But my philosophy is that plot advancement is not what the experience of reading fiction is about. If all we care about is advancing the plot, why read novels? We can just read Cliffs Notes.
I wrote books to entertain. I'm not trying to teach anything! If I suspected the author was trying to show me how to be a better behaved girl, I shut the book.
Some people read only because they are too lazy to think.
... one reads, above all, to prevent oneself thinking.
Nobody reads a book to get to the middle.
I never read to kill time. Killing time is like killing someone's wife or a child. There is nothing more precious for me than time.
Let us read with method, and propose to ourselves an end to which our studies may point. The use of reading is to aid us in thinking.
Reading without purpose is sauntering not exercise.
A book is not completed till it's read.
When we read, we are not looking for new ideas, but to see our own thoughts given the seal of confirmation on the printed page. The words that strike us are those that awake an echo in a zone we have already made our own—the place where we live—and the vibration enables us to find fresh starting points within ourselves
The end of reading is not more books but more life.
For her, reading was directly linked to pleasure, not to knowledge or enigmas or constructions or verbal labyrinths.
We should read other people's books in order to learn what we feel; it is our own thoughts we should be developing, even if it is another writer's thought that help us to do so.
I know people who read and read, and for all the good it does them, they might as well cut bread and butter. Unless you give at least 45 minutes of careful, fatiguing reflection upon what you are reading, your minutes are chiefly wasted.
A man ought to read just as inclination leads him, for what he reads as a task will do him little good.
We do not read to pass the time, but to inhabit time.
It is not enough to simply teach children to read; we have to give them something worth reading.
The good of a book lies in its being read. A book is made up of signs that speak of other signs, which in their turn speak of things. Without an eye to read them, a book contains signs that produce no concepts; therefore it is dumb.
I don’t believe one reads to escape reality. A person reads to confirm a reality he knows is there, but which he has not experienced.
We use books like mirrors, gazing into them only to discover ourselves.
If there was no Bible, it would be no matter whether you could read or not. Reading other books would do you no good.
What is this obsession people have with books? They put them in their houses like they're trophies. What do you need it for after you read it?
