Read Books Quotes

You must be compelled by an inner force to read books, listen to music, and view films which serve only to send you spiraling deeper into the bottomless pit of frustration. ~ Gary Reilly

Ignorance must be prosecuted when arrested. The only way for its arrest is by information and the only way for prosecution is through reading and learning of new things. ~ Israelmore Ayivor

I don't read books. I read the Daily Express and The Star. ~ Tim Sherwood

I remember when I first started being in magazines, I had pretty thin skin. I was this nerd that read books and stayed home and didn't go out. ~ Winona Ryder

When I was a child I used to read books by Gerald Durrell, who founded Jersey Zoo. He had a job collecting animals for zoos and for a long time that is what I wanted to do. Later when I was a teenager I had a fantastic English teacher called Mrs. Stafford. Her enthusiasm made me decide to be a writer. ~ Melvin Burgess

I just want to read books and be emotionally crippled by the deaths of fake people who never existed, is that too much to ask?" Katsuki ~ Katsuki (goodreads)

We will read books together inside the blanket and stay warm. And keep writing poetry in our respective journals. Time will fly but we will still remain inside the blanket forever. ~ Avijeet Das

I was arguing not that everyone should read books by ladies - though shifting the balance matters - but that maybe the whole point of reading is to be able to explore and also transcend your gender (and race and class and orientation and nationality and moment in history and age and ability) and experience being others. ~ Rebecca Solnit

Brian Walker and David Salt have written a thoughtful and powerful book to help resource users and managers put resilience thinking into practice and aim toward increasing the sustainability of our world. I urge public officials, scholars, and students in public policy programs to place this volume on their list of must-read books. It is a powerful antidote to the overly simplified proposals too often offered as solutions to contemporary problems at multiple scales. ~ Elinor Ostrom

Lectures broke into one's day and were clearly a terrible waste of time, necessary no doubt if you were reading law or medicine or some other vocational subject, but in the case of English, the natural thing to do was talk a lot, listen to music, drink coffee and wine, read books, and go to plays, perhaps be in plays ... ~ Stephen Fry

Experts generally agree that taking all opportunities to read books and other material aloud to children is the best preparation for their learning to read. The pleasures of being read to are far more likely to strengthen a child's desire to learn to read than are repetitions of sounds, alphabet drills, and deciphering uninteresting words. ~ Lilian Katz

This is Leo's first night here. Leo was in charge of putting the napkins out and I notice that he put them on the right and they're supposed to go on the left. I only know this because I like to read books like Ann of Green Gables, and Little House on the Prairie, and I pick up random things like that from the stories. ~ Mia Sheridan

During the post-breakdown period, she read books the way an addict swallowed pills. She devoured stories one after the other, trying not to let reality intrude too deeply. ~ Susan Wiggs

Often on a wet day I begin counting up; what I've read and what I haven't read. ~ Virginia Woolf

I don't read books. I read 'On the Road' in high school, and that was awesome, so I guess that's my favorite book. 'To Kill a Mockingbird,' even though I didn't read it, that's the greatest story. SparkNotes came in when I was in high school, and that was the greatest invention. ~ Meghan Trainor

I still love books. Nothing a computer can do can compare to a book. You can't really put a book on the Internet. Three companies have offered to put books by me on the Net, and I said, 'If you can make something that has a nice jacket, nice paper with that nice smell, then we'll talk.' All the computer can give you is a manuscript. People don't want to read manuscripts. They want to read books. Books smell good. They look good. You can press it to your bosom. You can carry it in your pocket. ~ Ray Bradbury

Life is wonderful and strange...and it's also absolutely mundane and tiresome. It's hilarious and it's deadening. It's a big, screwed-up morass of beauty and change and fear and all our lives we oscillate between awe and tedium. I think stories are the place to explore that inherent weirdness; that movement from the fantastic to the prosaic that is life....

What interests me - and interests me totally - is how we as living human beings can balance the brief, warm, intensely complicated fingersnap of our lives against the colossal, indifferent, and desolate scales of the universe. Earth is four-and-a-half billion years old. Rocks in your backyard are moving if you could only stand still enough to watch. You get hernias because, eons ago, you used to be a fish. So how in the world are we supposed to measure our lives - which involve things like opening birthday cards, stepping on our kids' LEGOs, and buying toilet paper at Safeway - against the absolutely incomprehensible vastness of the universe?

How? We stare into the fire. We turn to friends, bartenders, lovers, priests, drug-dealers, painters, writers. Isn't that why we seek each other out, why people go to churches and temples, why we read books? So that we can find out if life occasionally sets other people trembling, too? ~ Anthony Doerr

[ ... ]No book can be really complete in this life; it has to end where the author's time and understanding end. There is always something left unsaid. I look forward to the life to come as the unending last chapter of all the good books I have ever read. ~ Kathryn Lindskoog

Above all, believe. Cultivate your swagger. Make this your new religion: You are funny and talented, and you're going to try something new. This is the exact right time for that. This is the most important year of your life, and for once you are NOT going to let yourself down. If you fall down and feel depressed, you will get back up. If you feel lethargic and scared, you will try something else: a new routine, a new roommate situation, a healthier diet. You will read books about comedy. You will work tirelessly and take pride in your tireless work. And you will take time every few hours to stop and say to yourself, "Look at me. I'm doing it. I'm chasing my dream. I am following my calling." It doesn't matter if your dreams come true, if agents swoon and audiences cheer. Trust me on that: It truly doesn't matter. What matters is the feeling that you're doing it, every day. What matters is the work - diving in, feeling your way in the dark, finding the words, trusting yourself, embracing your weird voice, celebrating your quirks on the page, believing in all of it. What matters is the feeling that you're not following someone else around, that you're not half-assing this, that you're not waiting for something to happen, that you're not waiting for your whole life to start.

What matters is you, all alone at your desk at five in the morning. I write this from my own desk at five in the morning, my favorite place, a place where I know who I am and what I'm meant to ac ~ Heather Havrilesky

I feel as if someone is going to come along, feel my collar and say: 'Do you really think you can get people to read books you've made up about people that don't exist?' ~ Deborah Moggach

Happiness is not always reading the same page in the same book. Sometimes it is just wanting to hold the others book for them to read. ~ Faye Hall

I teach myself archaeology, I teach myself Spanish, and that's because it can be fun, it can be useful. So I keep studying. I read books because I still want to study. I don't want to stop. ~ Philippe Falardeau

One of my favorite examples involves Dr. Peter Greenspan, a Jewish obstetrician-gynecologist who also teaches at a medical school. The more he read books by critics who were trying to attack the prophecies, the more he recognized the flaws in their arguments. Ironically, concluded Greenspan, "I think I actually came to faith in Y'shua [Jesus] by reading what detractors wrote."36 ~ Ravi Zacharias

This was because their English teachers would wince and cover their ears and give them flunking grades and so on whenever they failed to speak like English aristocrats before the First World War. Also: they were told that they were unworthy to speak or write their language if they couldn't love or understand incomprehensible novels and poems and plays about people long ago and far away, such as Ivanhoe. *** The black people would not put up with this. They went on talking English every which way. They refused to read books they couldn't understand - on the grounds they couldn't understand them. They would ask such impudent questions as, Whuffo I want to read no Tale of Two Cities? Whuffo? ~ Kurt Vonnegut

You might jump in at this point and say: Hey. Guy. (It's Mark.) Okay, Mark. If the same day is repeating over and over again, if every morning it just goes back to the beginning automatically, with everything exactly the way it was, then you could basically do whatever you want, am I right? I mean, sure, you could go to the library, but you could go to the library naked and it wouldn't even matter, because it would all be erased the next day like a shaken Etch A Sketch. You could, I don't know, rob a bank or hop a freight train or tell everybody what you really think of them. You could do anything you wanted.
Which was, yes, theoretically true. But honestly, in this heat, who has the energy? What I wanted was to sit on my ass somewhere air-conditioned and read books. ~ Lev Grossman

Don't give up. Research like crazy. Join a writer's organization. Read books on the publishing world. It all helps! ~ Darynda Jones

The books that matter to me ... are those that galvanize something inside me. I read books to read myself. ~ Sven Birkerts

Instead, I read books in the library, huddling on a bean bag in a corner and getting lost in somebody else's victories and troubles. I never had much time for fiction before. I preferred real life. Mathematics. Solutions. Things that actually have a bearing on my life. But I can understand now why people read, why they like to get lost in somebody else's life. Sometimes I'll read a sentence and it will make me sit up, jolt me, because it is something that I have recently felt but never said out loud. I want to reach into the page and tell the characters that I understand them, that they are not alone, that I'm not alone, that it's okay to feel like this. And then the lunch bell rings the book closes and I'm plunged back into reality. ~ Cecelia Ahern

Continual Learning Educate yourself. Read books and learn from others who have done it before. Learn by doing. Theory is nice, but nothing replaces actual experience. Learn by surrounding yourself with talented players. Just because you win a hand doesn't mean you're good and you don't have more learning to do. You might have just gotten lucky. Don't be afraid to ask for advice. ~ Tony Hsieh

It is possible to find the passion to read. ~ Lailah Gifty Akita

Klaus sighed, and opened a book, and as at so many other times when the middle Baudelaire child did not want to think about his circumstances, he began to read. ~ Lemony Snicket

Compared with my brother, I always felt like Richard III, some clever humpbacked thing who surpassed him in the end. He was the one who read books, but I became the writer. He painted and drew, but I was the one who got accepted by the High School of Music and Art. ~ Jerome Charyn

How mean to buy only as many books as one will actually have time to read. ~ Alain De Botton

But seriously Poirot, what a hobby! Compare that to
" his voice sank to an appreciative purr
"an easy chair in front of a wood fire in a long low room lined with books
must be a long room
not a square one. Books all round one. A glass of port
and a book open in your hand. Time rolls back as you read. ~ Agatha Christie

At the end of the story of my life, I want to say it was the best book I had ever read. ~ Avina Celeste

An illiterate person who dies, let us say at my age, has lived one life, whereas I have lived the lives of Napoleon, Caesar, d'Artagnan. So I always encourage young people to read books, because it's an ideal way to develop a great memory and a ravenous multiple personality. And then at the end of your life you have lived countless lives, which is a fabulous privilege. ~ Umberto Eco

I rode my bike home and did the one thing that always helped when things weren't going well. I read. Books were my refuge. Getting lost in a solid adventure story was the best way I knew of to turn off reality. ~ D.J. MacHale

When I read books it's to escape. It's so I don't have to talk to people. ~ Stephen Colbert

Reading is my favourite occupation, when I have leisure for it and books to read. ~ Anne Bronte

Music brought the war in Vietnam right into our bedrooms. Songs we heard from America made us interested in politics; they were history lessons in a palatable, exciting form. We demonstrated against the Vietnam and Korean wars, discussed sexual liberation, censorship and pornography and read books by Timothy Leary, Hubert Selby Jr (Last Exit to Brooklyn) and Marshall McLuhan because we'd heard all these people referred to in songs or interviews with musicians. [...] Music, politics, literature, art all crossed over and fed into each other. There were some great magazines around too [...] Even though we couldn't afford to travel, we felt connected to other countries because ideas and events from those places reached us through music and magazines. ~ Viv Albertine

I got interested in the question of literacy because writers are always moaning about why more people don't read books. ~ Robert Hass

Dedicated ereaders are as sharp as steak knives in doing what they're supposed to do, which is let you read books. The iPad is more like a Swiss Army knife
it can cut the steak and uncork a wine bottle, and there's even a toothpick to use when you're done eating! It's got it all. ~ Jason Merkoski

If anybody would make me the greatest king that ever lived, with palaces, and gardens and fine dinners, and wine, and coaches, and beautiful clothes, and hundreds of servants, on condition that I would not read books, I would not be a king. ~ Thomas B. Macaulay

He had promised Leslie that after Christmas he would stay home and fix up the house and plant his garden and listen to music and read books out loud and write only in his spare time. ~ Katherine Paterson

In the great cities we see so little of the world, we drift into our minority. In the little towns and villages there are no minorities ; people are not numerous enough. You must see the world there, perforce. Every man is himself a class; every hour carries its new challenge. When you pass the inn at the end of the village you leave your favourite whimsy behind you; for you will meet no one who can share it. We listen to eloquent speaking, read books and write them, settle all the affairs of the universe. The dumb village multitudes pass on unchanging; the feel of the spade in the hand is no different for all our talk: good seasons and bad follow each other as of old. The dumb multitudes are no more concerned with us than is the old horse peering through the rusty gate of the village pound. The ancient map-makers wrote across unexplored regions, 'Here are lions.' Across the villages of fishermen and turners of the earth, so different are these from us, we can write but one line that is certain, 'Here are ghosts. ~ W.B. Yeats

If you have children, trust them completely, all the time, no matter what. If you don't trust them, pretend that you do. Listen to everything they say and take their advice. Believe them.

Trust everyone. Everyone behaves better when they feel they're trusted. Nobody wins a fight; the trick is to behave decently no matter what. The trick is to make love a lot. And think of it as making love. Always be making love.

Read lots of books. Read books from foreign countries. Forget yourself. Get lost in it. Give yourself over. Look up from your book and see that it is dark now and everything has changed. ~ Lisa Moore

Mostly because I've realized what a lame teenager I was. I was always home at the stroke of midnight; I didn't like drinking mash; I didn't have sex. I read books and had an inferiority complex because I was afraid to do all that other stuff. I don't know anything about being a badass punk rocker. ~ Karin Tidbeck

When I get the possibility of using a character like Bruce Wayne or Dick Grayson, I try and think about what's most exciting or interesting about them as a person, so I try and think what they are at their core, or what piece of their psychology do I gravitate toward that I respect, and I'm excited by it when I read books about them. ~ Scott Snyder

Read books when you are free, read minds when you are'nt ... but do read ... ~ Rabindranath Tagore

Strange how things sometimes turn out. You grow up and experience things and read books and get to know people and places and arrive at an age that you used to believe in, and then in the end it seems that everything in life is a matter of luck, that your life and everyone's life is a small inside-out universe through which everything moves blindly and without purpose, a universe without a god, without rules, without purpose - chaos. And then something happens to shake that belief and you start to wonder whether you might have made a mistake, if there might in fact be something that gives meaning to the chaos, if there might be some secret thread that ties everything in your life together, a secret thread that ties your life to the lives of others. And you get scared. You get scared because while it might be truly frightening to live in chaos it's twice as frightening to know that you live not in chaos but in a world with laws and rules that you yourself will never learn, that you're incapable of learning - no matter how hard you try, you'll never find that thin secret thread, never grasp it, never find the thing that has both beginning and end. ~ Christos Ikonomou

I like to read books. I like to listen to music. ~ Haruki Murakami

We've reached the point where a Rhodes Scholar like Florida State's Joe O'Shea - a philosophy major, no less - is comfortable admitting not only that he doesn't read books but that he doesn't see any particular need to read them. ~ Nicholas Carr

Life is the most effective school ever created. Once upon a time they made children bow their heads and read books. It would take ages to get anything across." He taps his head. "But we have widgets and datapads now, and we Golds have the lower Colors to do our research. We need not study chemistry or physics. We have computers and others to do that. What we must study is humanity. In order to rule, ours must be the study of political, psychological, and behavioral science - how desperate human beings react to one another, how packs form, how armies function, how things fall apart and why. You could learn this nowhere else but here. ~ Pierce Brown

What made Madeleine sit up in bed was something closer to the reason she read books in the first place and had always loved them. Here was a sign that she wasn't alone. Here was an articulation of what she had been so far mutely feeling. In bed on a Friday night, wearing sweatpants, her hair tied back, her glasses smudged, and eating peanut butter from the jar, Madeleine was in a state of extreme solitude. ~ Jeffrey Eugenides

You see? Characters in books do not read books. Oh, they snap them shut when somebody enters a room, or fling them aside in disgust at what they fancy is said within, or hide their faces in one which they pretend to peruse while somebody else lectures them on matters they'd rather not confront. But they do not read them. 'Twould be recursive, rendering each book effectively infinite, so that no single one might be finished without reading them all. This is the infallible message of discovering on which side of the page you are on. ~ Michael Swanwick

I never read gossip press. I just read books. And I never switch on the TV anymore. ~ Daphne Guinness

But suddenly, Pentunia spied the Book. The firecrackers had blown it open so that the pages showed. She had never seen them before. Now she saw that there was something written inside the Book which she could not read. So she sat down and thought and thought and thought, until at last she sighed, 'Now I understand. It was not enough to carry wisdom under my wing. I must put it in my mind and in my heart. And to do that I must learn to read. ~ Roger Duvoisin

Make sure you meet the right people, people who know that industry and are willing to help you. Do your homework - read books about the industry, talk to people. If you don't know something, ask. ~ Anwar Robinson

There are people who read books and there are people that make noise. ~ David Gustafson

Learn how to cook. Read books that will educate you. Get an education. Get a career. And support yourself. And live in a section of town that isn't conducive to violence. ~ Chris Rock

Read books. Care about things. Get excited. Try not to be too down on youself. Enjoy the ever present game of knowing. ~ Hank Green

I only had two real tasks [while in Norway]: gathering dead trees to burn from the surrounding small forest and getting water from a hole in a frozen stream. The rest of the time I wandered around, obsessed over my life dramas, stared into space, read books, wrote letters, made up songs, went crazy and eventually snapped out of my misery and noticed the dawn ~ Phil Elverum

How do you know they're magic and not some mechanical device of the dwarves?" Tanis asked, sensing that Tas was hiding something.
Tas gulped. He had been hoping Tanis wouldn't ask him that question.
"Uh," Tas stammered, "I---I guess I did sort of happened to, uh, mention them to Raistilin one night when you were all busy doing something else. He told me they might be magic. To find out, he said one of those weird spells of his and they--uh--began to glow. That meant they were enchanted. He asked me what they did and I demonstated and he said they were 'glasses of true seeing.' The dwarven magic-users of old made them to read books written in other languages and--" Tas stopped.
"And?" Tanis pursued.
"And--uh--magic spellbooks." Tas's voice was a whisper.
"And what else did Raistlin say?"
"That if I touched his spellbooks or even looked at them sideways, he'd turn me into a cricket and s-swallow m-me whole," Tasselhoff stammered. He looked up at Tanis with his wide eyed. "I belived him, too."
Tanis shook his head. Trust Raistlin to come up with a threat awful enough to quensh the curiosity of a kender. ~ Margaret Weis

I am a grenade," I said again. "I just want to stay away from people and read books and think and be with you guys because there's nothing I can do about hurting you: You're too invested, so just please let me do that, okay?
"I'm going to go to my room and read for awhile, okay? I'm fine. I really am fine: I just want to go read for a while. ~ John Green

Armies aren't very good about carrying libraries with them. I can't imagine why. We'd fight so much less if everyone would juste sit down and read ~ Cynthia Hand

She does not read it the way she and Kat used to read books - devouring them with the speed of two people famished for words, ideas, and beautiful sentences that make you feel everything. No, she reads Endurance the way a person might read the Bible - in small passages, repeated again and again, to help her stay grounded. To help her persevere, and understand her place in the world.
She has missed books, but she's been afraid of them, same as music. Books make you feel things hard. They hit the tender spots. Books remind her of her and Kat, but also of her old self, too, the mostly carefree self. The girl who was just so happy to come home from the library with a big stack of new stuff to read. Books were dangerous. ~ Deb Caletti

It is a good thing to read books, and need not be a bad thing to write them, but in any case, it is a pious thing to collect them. ~ Frederick Locker-Lampson

I will drink wine now, for I must prepare myself for the question which my mother will now ask. She will say: "Do you go to Mass every Sunday, my Jimmy?" I will answer: "Sometimes, Ma. Sometimes." I will be lying. She will ask: "Do you still read books against God?" I will say, lying again: "Not any more, Ma." And I will look at the face of my mother, and I will remember a night when we lived in the South, and I came home, and I saw my mother in tears, and sick unto death, and the doctor was called, and he saved my mother, and he came out of the room wherein my mother lay, and he held a book in his hand, and he handed it to me, and he said: "This is the cause. If you must read such stuff as this, do it where your mother can't see you." When I looked at the book, I saw that it was the The Anti-Christ. Now I will be home soon, and my mother will ask if I read books against God, and I will answer that I do not. ~ John Fante

I honestly think I was an Indian living in the time of the Trail of Tears. Something like that. Every time I read books about back then, I get so devastatingly sad, so, so ... I feel such a deep connection to it. ~ Q'orianka Kilcher

When I come home and look back through my Book of Books I see a personal narrative I didn't recognize at the time. I went from escaping into books to extracting things from them, from being inspired by books to trying to do things that inspired me - many of which I first encountered in stories. I went from wishing I were like a character in books to being a character in my books. I went from reading books to wrestling with them to writing them, all the while still learning from what I read. ~ Pamela Paul

Focus in on the genre you want to write, and read books in that genre. A LOT of books by a variety of authors. And read with questions in your mind. ~ Nicholas Sparks

Life's best adventures are as close as your nearest bookshelf. Tour Europe with the Count of Monte Cristo. Dance a ball with Mr Darcy. Hunt down bad guys with Stephanie Plum. Amazing things can happen when you read. ~ Ally Carter

Gather knowledge ... Visit galleries, museums, art and craft fairs ... Read books and magazines. Take workshops. Use your senses. Experience stimulates your memory and imagination. ~ Nita Leland

If you truly love film, I think the healthiest thing to do is not read books on the subject. I prefer the glossy film magazines with their big color photos and gossip columns, or the National Enquirer. Such vulgarity is healthy and safe. ~ Werner Herzog

From early youth I endeavored to read books in the right way and I was fortunate in having a good memory and intelligence to assist me. ~ Adolf Hitler

Even if our entire audiovisual legacy were to be lost in a power cut, we would still be able to read books in the light from the sun, or in the evening by a candlelight. ~ Jean-Claude Carriere

World's most widely read books. In the years that followed, Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, Anchee Min, and Dith Pran shared their harrowing memories of the communist nightmares in the Soviet Union, China, and Cambodia. ~ Steven Pinker

She read books quickly and compulsively, paperback after paperback, as if she might drift away without the anchor of the printed page. ~ Jane Hamilton

My whole thing is that I want to explore why you read books, what's the purpose of reading, and maybe that it's not that cool to hate something just because it's popular. ~ Josh Radnor

I only read books I know I will like ~ Vicky Unwin

I definitely subscribe to the idea that 9/11, to use an overused phrase, was a wake-up call. There was a year-long national teach-in on Islam - everyone read books and suddenly talked about Islam, and that was very productive. But there's no doubt that moment has passed. ~ Bruce Feiler

I love to read books. I love to read anything really, even the back of the cereal box.

But there is nothing that will ignite your soul like reading God's Word. ~ Rachel Wojnarowski

Finding oil is a multidisciplinary science. You need a lot of people - statisticians, engineers, and geologists, of course. And what I have learned in the past 30 years is that I read people better than I read books. ~ Eike Batista

Digital doesn't interest me. It's too many steps removed from the actual tactile thing. I still read books. I don't read online. ~ Jessica Lange

Was I wilfully blind when I married Michael? Of course I was. I knew about his heart condition - everyone did. But I fell in love with him and decided it didn't matter. We were going to live for ever, somehow. Now I know that the fact that we had the same initials, were both expatriates, had gone to the same university, and were of medium build made the relationship highly determined. But I might have done the research and discovered his short life expectancy or talked to psychologists about the pain of grieving or read books about the sadness of widowhood. But I didn't do any of those things. I looked away from those sad certainties and pretended that they weren't there.
Love is blind, not, as in mythology, because Cupid's arrows are random but because, once struck by them, we are left blind. When we love someone, we see them as smarter, wittier, prettier, stronger than anyone else sees them. ~ Margaret Heffernan

And sometimes then he sat with us for an hour or so, sharing our limbo, listening while I read. Books from any shelf, opened at any page, in which I would start and finish anywhere, mid-sentence sometimes. Wuthering Heights ran into Emma, which gave way to The Eustace Diamonds, which faded into Hard Times, which ceded to The Woman in White. Fragments. It didn't matter. Art, its completeness, its formedness, its finishedness, had no power to console. Words, on the other hand, were a lifeline. ~ Diane Setterfield

I'm a grenade," I said again. "I just want to stay away from people and read books and think and be with you guys because there's nothing I can do about hurting you; you're too invested, so just please let me do that, okay? I'm not depressed. I don't need to get out more. And I can't be a regular teenager, because I'm a grenade. ~ John Green

Have you really read all those books in your room?"

Alaska laughing- "Oh God no. I've maybe read a third of 'em. But I'm going to read them all. I call it my Life's Library. Every summer since I was little, I've gone to garage sales and bought all the books that looked interesting. So I always have something to read. ~ John Green

I don't want to sound pretentious, but I love art, I like to go to museums, and I like to read books. ~ Rainn Wilson

Yes! I'm me! I am careful and logical and I look up things I don't understand! When I hear people use the wrong words, I get edgy! I am good with cheese. I read books fast! I think! And I always have a piece of string! That's the kind of person I am! ~ Terry Pratchett

Two days ago, in the afternoon, Amanda said to me, "I can't read books any more. Who has the time?" It was the day after Oliver had left, and we were in this little café in the industrial part of the city. "Who can concentrate any more?" she said, stirring her coffee. "Who reads? Do you read?" (I shook my head.) "Somebody must read, I guess. You see all these books around in store windows, and there are those clubs. Somebody's reading," she said. "Who? I don't know anybody who reads. ~ Raymond Carver

Every day, I read books on philosophy and science fiction and human consciousness. ~ Tom DeLonge

I have lived a thousand lives and I've loved a thousand loves. I've walked on distant worlds and seen the end of time. Because I read. ~ George R R Martin

The difference between the extras here and in France is the French extras read books. Actually, they hide the book and pretend that they're acting. Here, you can see everybody wants his break. ~ Berenice Bejo

I recall having read, at the brothers' instance, Madame Blavatsky's Key to Theosophy. This book stimulated in me the desire to read books on Hinduism, and disabused me of the notion fostered by the missionaries that Hinduism was rife with superstition. ~ Mahatma Gandhi

One of the stories I love is how Gutenberg's printing press set off this interesting chain reaction, where all of a sudden people across Europe noticed for the first time that they were farsighted, and needed spectacles to read books (which they hadn't really noticed before books became part of everyday life); which THEN created a market for lens makers, which then created pools of expertise in crafting lenses, which then led people to tinker with those lenses and invent the telescope and microscope, which then revolutionized science in countless ways. ~ Steven Johnson

Something snapped inside her. "Of course I'm afraid! Relationships do bad things to me." He started to respond, but the pain had gone on long enough, and she didn't want to hear it. "You know what I want? I want peace. I want a good job and a decent place to live. I want to read books and listen to music and have time to make some female friendships that are going to last. When I wake up in the morning, I want to know that I have a decent shot at being happy. And here's what's really sad. Until I met you, I was almost there. ~ Susan Elizabeth Phillips

Now that he is no longer here I should be interested in so many things: philosophy, politics, history. I follow the news, read books, but they befuddle me. What he meant to say is not there, for he understood something else, something that was all-embracing, and he could not say it in words but only by living as he did. ~ Italo Calvino

I don't read books much. ~ LeBron James

As for 'too much description,' well, opinions differ. We write the books we want to read. And I want to read books that are richly textured and full of sensory detail, books that make me feel as if I am experiencing a story, not just reading it. Plot is only one aspect of telling a tale, and not the most important one. It is the journey that matters, not how fast you arrrive at the destination.
That's my view, anyway. Others writers differ, of course. There are hundreds of books where everything is subordinate to advancing the plot, some of them quite fine, but my work has never been about that, and never will be. ~ George R R Martin