Readers And Reading Quotes

Is it not a pity when some stylistic subtlety is lost without trace by the reader's inattention? ~ David Richards

The great thing about literature is that it's subjective. No two readers read the same book, because we all see the words through different eyes, filter the story through different life experiences. ~ Lisa Wingate

I love seeing the bookshops and meeting the booksellers
booksellers really are a special breed. No one in their right mind would take up clerking in a bookstore for the salary, and no one in his right mind would want to own one
the margin of profit is too small. So, it has to be a love of readers and reading that makes them do it
along with first dibs on the new books. ~ Mary Ann Shaffer

If words come alive on the page, the writer succeeds in connecting to the reader. ~ Aman Jassal

You have one of two choices. Either you can panic and start making frantic attempts to reform under the glare of these awful critical eyes, or you can just say, The hell with you! I know what I'm doing. If you don't yet, it's because you haven't given me an attentive reading. ~ Saul Bellow

'The Sisters Brothers' has endeared so many prize juries because the Western format has more of a broad appeal and is familiar to readers. ~ Patrick DeWitt

We've always been here and we'll always be here. We are a specific arrangement of particles and this instant is infinite. Did we luck out, or didn't we? The odds against this sentence having ever being typed, much less the odds against you reading it were inconceivable. Smile, because the fact that you're able to is almost impossible to comprehend. ~ Jeffrey Rowland

Usually the recipe for a bestseller is to give people what they want. My challenge is and was: Give them what they do not expect. Be severe with them. The world of media is full of easy answers, wash-and-wear philosophies, instant ecstacies, what-me-worry Epiphanies. Probably readers want a little more. ~ Umberto Eco

Where were you?" she asked before he turned the knob. He paused, and she clarified: "I came to the cottage last week to find you, to tell you about Reading, but you weren't there. Where were you?"
He glanced back at her. "You'll have to be more specific."
"Tuesday," she said. "I searched for a hint . . . waited, but you never came. I left the note on your windowsill."
A small smile touched his lips - almost a sheepish smile, of all things. Ceony had never before seen such an expression on his face. "Just out for a stroll. ~ Charlie N. Holmberg

Academics always feel that they deserve more. (Roberto Bolano)

Reading and enjoying fine literature is a highly cultivated and refined activity, whereas writing it is everything but so.
(xxx) ~ Kim Leine

All of the narration in 'Smile' is first-person. Most of the books that I grew up reading had first-person narrators for some reason. My diaries were written in this voice, and since this story is autobiographical, it just felt like a natural extension. ~ Raina Telgemeier

God be thanked for books! they are the voices of the distant and the dead, and make us heirs of the spiritual life of past ages. ~ W.e. Channing

For people who have been raised to expect books to be 100 percent pleasurable and to make that pleasure effortless, it is hard for them to read and appreciate serious fiction. That's not good. The problem isn't that today's readership is "dumb," I don't think. Just that TV and the commercial-art culture's trained it to be sort of lazy and childish in its expectations. But it makes trying to engage today's readers both imaginatively and intellectually unprecedentedly hard. ~ David Foster Wallace

The book the man is reading is the Word of God, the Bible. It has become both the focus of and the reason for his current state of perplexity and distress. The heavy burden on his back is his awakened knowledge and sense of his own sin. The man discovers the frightful condition of his heart, which provokes genuine and constant fears of damnation. These fears are an ever-present weight upon his entire person.
4. ~ John Bunyan

It's strange, talking about love. I used to hate the word.
Hate is too strong. I was sick of reading about it in books, hearing it in songs, watching it in films. It seemed such a huge burden to place on another person - to love them; to give them something so unbelievably fragile and expect them not to break it or lose it or leave it behind on the No.96 bus. ~ Michael Robotham

It was the fangirl code for every book geek: read, chat, squeal. Re-read, chat, and squeal again, until it's all over and the dreaded book funk sets in. Find the next best thing to fill the void, then repeat steps one through three as necessary. ~ Rachael Wade

I grow fond of David, who lays a single stone before Goliath and a single book, the Psalms, in the mouth of the world. ~ Erri De Luca

Feelings, too, are facts. Emotion is a fact. Human experience is a fact. It is often possible to gain more real insight into human beings and their motivation by reading great fiction than by personal acquaintance. ~ Eleanor Roosevelt

Science fiction is a literature that belongs to all humankind. It portrays events of interest to all of humanity, and thus science fiction should be the literary genre most accessible to readers of different nations. Science fiction often describes a day when humanity will form a harmonious whole, and I believe the arrival of such a day need not wait for the appearance of extraterrestrials. ~ Liu Cixin

Read for yourselves, read for the sake of your inspiration, for the sweet turmoil in your lovely head. But also read against yourselves, read for questioning and impotence, for despair and erudition, read the dry sardonic remarks of cynical philosophers like Cioran or even Carl Schmitt, read newspapers, read those who despise, dismiss or simply ignore poetry and try to understand why they do it. Read your enemies, read those who reinforce your sense of what's evolving in poetry, and also read those whose darkness or malice or madness or greatness you can't understand because only in this way will you grow, outlive yourself, and become what you are. ~ Adam Zagajewski

I want to be dipped into the world of a novel. I want to be immersed. I travel a lot for my work and my happiest moments are coming back to the hotel late at night, [knowing that a] book I've brought with me [is] waiting for me there. It's like my version of chocolates on a pillow. Fiction is a necessity in my life. It's a strange moment where the world is roiling. People are glued to the news, and rightly so. But what fiction can do is look with nuance and depth at something that's not always looked at that way. There are those studies that say fiction teaches empathy. I feel like, here's a chance. Reading fiction gives me a chance to look into other people and their lives. That's incredibly moving to me. ~ Meg Wolitzer

You should always have 2 books ... the one you're reading and the one you're writing. ~ Sterling W. Sill

The idea that students don't know how to write clearly and precisely is as old as school itself, probably, but lately it seems as if students no longer know how to read either. It is true on my campus and from I can gather, on many other college campuses. The students understand words, sentences
they are not illiterate
but they don't seem to grasp the reasons for reading. They seem baffled when asked to take two thoughts, connect them, and form something new. They read James Baldwin or Henry David Thoreau and their primary reaction seems to be, "Okay, now I've ready that. I'm done." As if the only goal in reading was to have looked at every word. ~ Dinty W. Moore

Reading is pleasure and happiness to be alive or sadness to be alive and above all it's knowledge and questions. ~ Roberto Bolano

Truly, books are wonderful things; to sit alone in a room and laugh and cry, because you are reading, and still be safe when you close the book; and having finished it, discover you are changed, yet unchanged! ~ Fay Weldon

Books are what you step on to take you to a higher shelf. The higher your stack of books, the higher the shelf you can reach. Want to reach higher? Stack some more books under your feet! Reading is what brings us to new knowledge. It opens new doors. It helps us understand mysteries. It lets us hear from successful people. Reading is what takes us down the road in our journey. Everything you need for a better future and success has already been written. ~ Jim Rohn

I am inside your skin, he whispered. I am reading your thoughts. What am I thinking? That you have fallen in love with me all over again. That you love my scars and my sinful habits, and my loyal heart that beats for you. That you want me to make another baby inside you, so there is no chance God will put us asunder again. ~ Beatriz Williams

To translate knowledge and information into experience: that seems to be the function of literature and art. ~ Joseph Campbell

Reading wasn't an attempt to educate myself. It was my chief escape from a world that, although gorgeous in landscape and rich with mountain culture, didn't provide what I needed - the promise of adventure, a life beyond the perimeter of hills. I often fantasized that I'd been adopted and had mysterious powers such as flying or teleportation. Books offered the promise of a world in which misfits like me could flourish. Within the pages of a novel, I was unafraid: of my father, of dogs, snakes, and the bully across the creek; of older boys who drove hot rods close enough to make me jump in the ditch; of armed men parked near the bootlegger. ~ Chris Offutt

The internet liquefied physical borders faster than they were already doing on their own. For all that, there are only regional writers. There are no "internet writers," like there used to be "paperback writers." Every tweet comes from somewhere, and that "somewhere" goes into the "somewhere" where you're reading it in. You read Nietzsche in the Ozarks for a while, let's say, then you get up and sweep the leaves from your porch for a longer while. Place wins on time spent every time, unless you're demented enough to put out your eyes on screens longer than you sweep. We are in a state of "transitional regionalism," a place where regions are instantly transmitted to other regions, but they don't universalize them, they only make them more provincial, by framing them with the local. ~ Andrei Codrescu

All I want is a modest place in Mr X's Good Reading, Miss Y's Good Writing, and that new edition of One Thousand Best Bits of Recent Prose. ~ James Agate

It has been found that the less an advertisement looks like an advertisement and the more it looks like an editorial, the more readers stop, look, and read. ~ David Ogilvy

My friend and Old Testament professor Tremper Longman once told me that reading the Bible is somewhat like watching the movie The Sixth Sense. That movie has a startling ending that forces you to go back and reinterpret everything you saw before. The second time through, you can't not think of the ending as you watch the beginning and middle of the movie. The ending sheds unignorable light on everything that went before. ~ Timothy Keller

An emigration is possibly the loneliest experience a man can suffer. In a way it is not a country he has lost but a home, or even just a part of a home, a room perhaps, or something in that room that he has had to leave behind, and which haunts him. I remember a window-seat I used to sit in as a youth, reading Pushkin and teaching myself to smoke scented cigarettes. That window is one I am always knocking at, asking to be let in. ~ Paul Scott

One of the qualities essential to being good at reading poetry is also one of the qualities essential to being good at life: a capacity for surprise. It's easy to become so mired in our likes or dislikes that we can no longer recall that person who once responded to poems - and to people - without any preconceived notions of what we wanted them to be. ~ Christian Wiman

Whenever I'm doing any film, there's always three different things. There's the script, which is really just a blueprint. And then, you shoot the movie and it's an entirely different experience than you would expect from reading the script. And then, there's the whole post process and the editing, and it becomes something else entirely. ~ Thomas Ian Nicholas

That is as true for fiction or non-fiction. The writer has to really know their subject. It is really important to remember that the readers are a lot smarter than the writer. Also, good writing has to do with rewriting. You will never get it right the first time. So you rewrite and rewrite again until you get it right. Until you, and the reader, will be able to visualize what you're writing about. ~ Michael Scott

Maybe I'm reading too much into this. It's probably nothing. But I've had "nothing" for too long, and I'm ready for something. Anything. ~ Beth Revis

He did not wholly understand the intricate play of ideas and the complex phrases, but as he read he sensed a strong, who purpose behind the words and he felt that he almost understood. ~ Carson McCullers

There are a lot of us, some published, some not, who think the literary life is the loveliest one possible, this life of reading and writing and corresponding. We think this life is nearly ideal. ~ Anne Lamott

Tyrena did not laugh again but her smile slashed upward in a twist of green lips. "Martin, Martin, Martin," she said, "the population of literate people has been declining steadily since Gutenberg's day. By the twentieth century, less than two percent of the people in the so-called industrialized democracies read even one book a year. And that was before the smart machines, dataspheres, and user-friendly environments. ~ Dan Simmons

No player in the NBA was born wanting to play basketball. The desire to play ball or to read must be planted. The last 25 years of research show that reading aloud to a child is the oldest, cheapest and must successful method of instilling that desire. Shooting baskets with a child creates a basketball player; reading to a child creates a reader. ~ Jim Trelease

Thomas Hauser respects boxing and boxers. He gives readers insight into what happens in and out of the ring. Everything he writes is fair-minded and reality-based with a human touch. ~ Lennox Lewis

...dances on the edge of magic and logic, animal and human, the conscious and subconscious mind. Drawing inspiration from the edge while still moving forward on the Fool's journey - that is Linestriding. ~ Siolo Thompson

Internationalism' is a way of reading, and not a demography of readership. ~ Amit Chaudhuri

I don't believe in telling people what they should do, so I'll tell you what you shouldn't do instead... young people can't write a book because they don't have enough life experience, teachers and parents please cover your ears for a second, that it BULLSHIT! Anyone can write a book if they have an idea. ~ Lili Wilkinson

A book is a match in the smoking second between strike and flame. ~ Stephanie Butland

We are all children that need nurturing, love and care. So give your inner child that nurturing and love, give yourself back the joy of preparing healthy and nutritious meals, joy of experiencing food without TV, reading, working, rush. ~ Natasa Nuit Pantovic