“A man ought to read just as inclination leads him; for what he reads as a task will do him little good.” – Samuel Johnson (quoted in James Boswell’s Life of Johnson, 1791)
“All good and true book-lovers practice the pleasing and improving avocation of reading in bed.” – Eugene Field (Love Affairs of a Bibliomaniac, 1896)
“And indeed, what is better than to sit by one’s fireside in the evening with a book, while the wind beats against the window and the lamp is burning?” – Gustave Flaubert (Madame Bovary)
“Apparently, there is a skill that people pay to acquire called speed reading. That makes as much sense as a course in speed love-making.” – Guy Browning (2003)
“Books at their best and in their most favorable moments of reception revitalize. The end of reading is not more books but more life.” – Holbrook Jackson (The Reading of Books)
“Books have their idiosyncracies as well as people, and will not show me their full beauties unless the place and the time in which they are read suits them….I cannot read Thoreau in a drawing room….” – Elizabeth Arnim (The Solitary Summer)
“Books support us in our solitude and keep us from being a burden to ourselves.” – Jeremy Collier
“Charles Lamb once said, in his quaint and delightful way, that he wished to ask a ‘grace before reading’ more than a ‘grace before dinner.’ ” – M.F. Sweetsr, “What People Read,” in Hints for Home Reading edited by Lyman Abbott, 1883
“Early on weekday mornings, I’d read in my bed. I’d feel a mysterious comfort then, reading in the dawn quiet – the blue-gray silence interrupted by the occasional churning of the refrigerator motor a few rooms away or the more distant sounds of a city bus beginning its run.” – Richard Rodriguez
“Every man who knows how to read has it in his power to magnify himself, to multiply the ways in which he exists, to make his life full, significant, and interesting.” – Aldous Huxley (Jesting Pilate; quoted by Helen E. Harris in Living with Books: The Art of Books Selection, 2nd ed., 1950)
“Every reader exists to ensure for a certain book a modest immortality. Reading is, in this sense, a ritual of rebirth.” – Alberto Manguel (The Library at Night)
“Every single pleasure I can imagine or have experienced is more delightful, more of a pleasure, if you take it in small sips, if you take your time. Reading is not an exception.” – Amos Oz
“Fiction is a kind of compassion-generating machine that saves us from sloth. Is life kind or cruel? Yes, Literature answers. Are people good or bad? You bet, says Literature. But unlike other systems of knowing, Literature declines to eradicate one truth in favor of another; rather, it teaches us to abide with the fact that, in their own way, all things are true, and helps us, in the face of this terrifying knowledge, continually push ourselves in the direction of Open the Hell Up.”— George Saunders
“From your parents you learn love and laughter and how to put one foot before the other. But when books are opened you discover that you have wings.” – Helen Hayes
“Good reading does for the mind what good glasses do for the eyes: it lets you in on the details of living….Good reading is like being converted, or falling in love, or getting married: the whole world has a new smell!” – J. Bernard Haviland (“Reading More Effectively,” quoted in The Wonderful World of Books edited by Alfred Stefferud, 1953)
“I must say I find television very educational. The minute somebody turns it on, I go to the library and read a good book. ” – Groucho Marx (cited in A Little Learning is a Dangerous Thing edited by James Charlton, 1994)
“I suggest that the only books that influence us are those for which we are ready, and which have gone a little farther down our particular path than we have yet got ourselves.” – E. M. Forster
“I would sooner read a timetable or a catalogue than nothing at all.” – W. Somerset Maugham (cited in The 21st Century Dictionary of Quotations edited by the Princeton Language Institute, 1993)
“It is a tie between men to have read the same book.” – Ralph Waldo Emerson (Journals, 1864)
“I’ve never known any troubles that an hour’s reading didn’t assuage.” – Montesquieu (1689-1755)
“Let us read and let us dance – two amusements that will never do any harm to the world.” – Voltaire (1694-1778)
“Life is a perpetual plot to keep us from reading.” – Daniel Pennac (Better Than Life)
“It is not true that we have only one life to live; if we can read we can live as many more lives and as many kinds as we wish.” – Senator S.I. Hayakawa
“I’ve never had the time to read. But no one has ever kept me from finishing a novel I loved.” – Daniel Pennac (Better Than Life)
“I’ve never known any trouble that an hour’s reading didn’t assuage.” – Charles de Secondat, Baron de la Brede et de Montesquieu (Pensees Diverses)
“Most of us at one time or another have had the experience of being totally absorbed in a work of fiction. Phones go unanswered, meals uneaten, the lawn unmowed, the chickens unfed, while we linger in the spell of a master storyteller.” – Robert D. Jacobs (“Recreation: Fiction’s First Reward” in The Wonderful World of Books edited by Alfred Stefferud, 1953)
“No entertainment is so cheap as reading, nor any pleasure so lasting.” – Lady Mary Wortley Montagu
“One of the amusements of idleness is reading without the fatigue of close attention; and the world therefore swarms with writers whose wish is not to be studied, but to be read.” – Samuel Johnson (The Idler, #30, 1758)
“People say that life is the thing, but I prefer reading.” – Logan Pearsall Smith (Afterthoughts, 1931)
“People who say they don’t have time to read simply don’t want to.” – Julie Rugg and Lynda Murphy (A Book Lover’s Treasury, 2006)
“Reading is a lot like sex. It is a private and often secret activity. It is often undertaken in bed, and people are not inclined to underestimate either the extent or the effectiveness of their activity.” – Daniel Boorstein (Life Magazine, January 1984)
“Reading is a means of thinking with another person’s mind; it forces you to stretch your own.” – Florida Scott-Maxwell (Publishers Weekly, March 30, 1984)
“Reading is not a duty, and has consequently no business to be made disagreeable.” – Augustine Birrell (The Office of Literature, 1887)
“…Reading…is supposed to be, and often is, a pleasure: there is no possible reason why it should be elevated to a duty.” – Harold Nicolson (“How to Read Books,” 1937)
“Reading is the work of an alert mind, is demanding, and under ideal conditions produces finally a kind of ecstasy. This gives the experience of reading a sublimity and power unequalled by any other form of communication.” – E.B. White (cited in The Harper Book of Quotations)
“Reading is to the mind what exercise is to the body.” – Sir Richard Steele [also attributed to Joseph Addison]
“Reading, like prayer, remains one of our few private acts.” – William Jovanovich (cited in The Harper Book of Quotations)
“Reading means approaching something that is just coming into being. ” – Italo Calvino (If On a Winter’s Night a Traveller, 1981)
“Reading well is one of the great pleasures that solitude can afford you.” – Harold Bloom
“‘Tell me what you read and I’ll tell you who you are’ is true enough, but I’d know you better if you told me what you reread.” – Francois Mauriac
“The beauty of words, the sound and fall of sentences, a writer’s distinctive voice rising from the page – these, in the end, provide the greatest and most lasting pleasures of the reading life.” – Michael Dirda (Book by Book: Notes on the Reading Life, 2006)
“The best moments in reading are when you come across something – a thought, a feeling, a way of looking at things – which you had thought special and particular to you. Now here it is, set down by someone else, a person you have never met, someone even who is long dead. And it is as if a hand has come out and taken yours.” – Alan Bennett (The History Boys, 2004)
“The pleasantest of all diversions is to sit alone under the lamp, a book spread out before you, and to make friends with people of a distant pas yo have never known.” – Kenko (Essays in Idleness)
“The pleasure of all reading is doubled when one lives with another who shares the same books.” — Katherine Mansfield
“The time to read is any time: no apparatus, no appointment of time and place, is necessary. It is the only art which can be practised at any hour of the day or night; whenever the time and inclination comes, that is your time for reading; in joy or sorrow, health or illness.” – Holbrook Jackson (The Delights of Reading: Quotes, Notes and Anecdotes compiled by Otto L. Bettmann, 1987)
The worst way to read, he said, is with the thought that you do not have enough time. The only way to read is in the knowledge that there is an infinite amount of time stretching ahead, and that if one wishes to taste only a few sentences per day one is free to do so. – Gabriel Josipovivi (Moo Pak)
“The beauty of opening a new pursuit, or a new course of reading, imparts the vivacity and novelty of youth even to old age.” – Benjamin Disraeli (cited in The Harper Book of Quotations)
“The habit of reading is the only enjoyment I know in which there is no alloy. It lasts when all other pleasures fade. It will be there to support you when all other resources are gone. It will be present to you when the energies of your body have fallen away from you. It will make your hours pleasant to you as long as you live.” – Anthony Trollope
“The man who does not read good books has no advantage over the man who can’t read them.” – Mark Twain
“The very language with which we talk about reading metaphorically conveys its pleasures: ‘I devoured it,’ ‘I lapped it up,’ ‘I took it all in,’ ‘I couldn’t put it down,’ ‘I savored it page by page.’…Reading may be an alternative to lived experience, but it also makes it own physical as well as imaginative demands and offers its own sensuous gratifications….Like lovers, books entice, attract, sometimes disappoint, sometimes even repel.” – Willard Speigelman (“Reading,” from Seven Pleasures: Essays on Ordinary Happiness, 2009)
“There are two forms of recreation which are of almost universal appeal among cultivated people: first, the observation of nature; secondly, the reading of books.” – Theodore Wesley Koch (“Reading: A Vice or a Virtue,” a speech in Dayton, Ohio on June 10, 1928)
“There are worse crimes than burning books. One of them is not reading them.” – Joseph Brodsky (1940-1996)
“There is a great deal of difference between the eager man who wants to read a book and the tired man who wants a book to read.” – G.K. Chesterton
“There is a temperate zone in the mind, between luxurious indolence and exacting work; and it is to this region, just between laziness and labor, that summer reading belongs.” – Henry Ward Beecher
“There is no hour of the twenty-four which may not be profitably spent in reading. In the lonely watches of a sleepless night; in the precious hours of early morning; in the busy forenoon, the leisurely afternoon, or in the long winter evening; – whenever the time and inclination comes, that is your time for reading….I know of a woman who read Paradise Lost…aloud to her husband in a single winter, while he was shaving, that being the only available time.” – Charles F. Richardson (The Choice of Books, 1885)
“There is no pleasure so cheap, so innocent, and so remunerative as the real, hearty pleasure and taste for reading.” – Robert Lowe (1869)
“There is no reason why the same man should like the same books at eighteen and at forty-eight.” – Ezra Pound (ABC of Reading, 1934)
“Time spent reading is always time stolen. Like time spent writing, or loving, for that matter. Stolen from what? From life’s obligations. Which is probably why the subway – the very symbol of life’s many obligations – is the world’s largest reading room.” – Daniel Pennac (Better Than Life)
“To acquire the habit of reading is to construct for yourself a refuge from almost all the miseries of life.” – W. Somerset Maugham
“Until I feared I would lose it, I never loved to read. One does not love breathing.” – Harper Lee
“…We can read…to refresh and exercise our own creative powers. Is there not an open window on the right side of the bookcase?” – Virginia Woolf (The Common Reader, 1932)
“We live not with books themselves but with our memories of books: the bits and pieces we recall, the pages we dog-ear, the lines we highlight.” – Seth Lerer (quoted by Willard Speigelman in “Reading,” from Seven Pleasures: Essays on Ordinary Happiness, 2009)
“What we read with inclination makes a much stronger impression. If we read without inclination, half the mind is employed in fixing the attention; so there is but one half to be employed on what we read.” – Samuel Johnson
“When I think of all the books still left for me to read, I am certain of further happiness.” – Jule Renard
“Whether it is the well-thumbed reference book in the study, workshop, or kitchen, whether it is the biography or the novel borrowed from the library, or whether it is the personal copy always there on one’s own bookshelves, the book is a private medium of communication in a world where privacy is becoming more difficult to attain and maintain.” – Peter H. Mann (Books: Buyers and Borrowers, 1971)
“You may perhaps be brought to acknowledge that it is very well worthwhile to be tormented for two or three years of one’s life, for the sake of being able to read all the rest of it.” – Jane Austen (Northanger Abbey, 1818)
“You must read as you live: promiscuously. You must go…to the local libraries and scan the shelves, pulling things out randomly, thumbing the pages, reading the openings, and allowing your eyes to wander where they will. Take shopping bags, backpacks, with you. Fill them up. Bring them home. Some things will command your attention for more than a minute; those that don’t, take back. Reading must be violently fickle, experimental, capricious, and even dangerous.” – Willard Speigelman (“Reading,” from Seven Pleasures: Essays on Ordinary Happiness, 2009)
“…Reading has become an act of meditation, with all of meditation’s attendant difficulty and grace. I sit down. I try to make a place for silence. It’s harder than it used to be, but still, I read.” – David L. Ulin (“The Lost Art of Reading,” Los Angeles Times, August 9, 2009)
“Reading is not just acquainting ourselves with a text or acquiring knowledge; it is also, from its first moments, an inevitable process of forgetting. Even as I read, I start to forget what I have read, and this process is unavoidable. It extends to the point where it’s as though I haven’t read the book at all, so that in effect I find myself rejoining the ranks of the non-readers, where I should no doubt have remained in the first place. At this point, saying we have read a book becomes essentially a form of metonymy. When it comes to books, we never read more than a portion of greater or lesser length, and that portion is, in the longer or shorter term, condemned to disappear. When we talk about books, then, to ourselves and to others, it would be more accurate to say that we are talking about our approximate recollections of books, arranged as a function of our current circumstances.” – Pierre Bayard (How to Talk About Books You Haven’t Read, 2007, page 47)
“Reading is that fruitful miracle of communication in the midst of solitude.” – Marcel Proust
“Reading was my escape and my comfort, my consolation, my stimulant of choice: reading for the pure pleasure of it, for the beautiful stillness that surrounds you when you hear an author’s words reverberating in your head.” - Paul Auster (The Brooklyn Follies)
“The written word, obviously, is very inward, and when we’re reading, we’re thinking. It’s a sort of spiritual, meditative activity. When we’re looking at visual objects, I think our eyes are obviously directed outward, so there’s not as much reflective time. And it’s the reflectiveness about reading that appeals to me.” – Joyce Carol Oates
“I read so that I can live more than one life in more than one place.” – Ann Tyler
“Literature duplicates the experience of living in a way that nothing else can, drawing you so fully into another life that you temporarily forget you have one of your own. That is why you read it, and might even sit up in bed ’till early dawn, throwing your whole tomorrow out of whack, simply to find out what happens to some people who, you know perfectly well, are made up.” – Barbara Kingsolver
“A good reader, a major reader, an active and creative reader is a rereader.” Vladimir Nabokov
“In the case of books, the point is not to see how many of them you can get through, but rather how many can get through to you.” – Mortimer J. Adler
“In anything fit to be called by the name of reading, the process itself should be absorbing and voluptuous; we should gloat over a book, be rapt clean out of ourselves, and rise from the perusal, our mind filled with the busiest, kaleidoscopic dance of images, incapable of sleep or of continuous thought. The words, if the book be eloquent, should run thence-forward in our ears like the noise of breakers, and the story, if it be a story, repeat itself in a thousand coloured pictures to the eye.” – Robert Louis Stevenson
“We never stop reading, although every book comes to an end, just as we never stop living, although death is certain.” – Roberto Bolaño
“Book-love, I say again, lasts throughout life, it never flags or fails, but, like Beauty itself, is a joy forever.” – Holbrook Jackson
“In its silence, a book is a challenge: it can’t lull you with surging music or deafen you with screeching laugh tracks or fire gunshots in your living room; you have to listen to it in your head. A book won’t move your eyes for you the way images on a screen do. It won’t do the work for you. To read a story well is to follow it, to act it, to become it - everything short of writing it, in fact. Reading is not ‘interactive’ with a set of rules or options, as games are; reading is actual collaboration with the writer’s mind. No wonder not everybody is up to it.” – Ursula K. Le Guin
“I know there are people who don’t read fiction at all. And I find it hard to understand how they can bear to be in the same head all the time.” – Diane Setterfield
“And maybe the measure of our reading should therefore be, not the number of books we’ve read, but the state in which they leave us. What does it matter how cultivated and up-to-date we are, or how many thousands of books we’ve read? What matters is how we feel, how we see, what we do after reading; whether the street and the clouds and the existence of others mean anything to us; whether reading makes us physically more alive.” – Gabriel Zaid
“Never read a book through merely because you have begun it.” – John Witherspoon
“Reading gives us someplace to go when we have to stay where we are.” – Mason Cooley
“Children are made readers in the laps of their parents.” – Emilie Buchwald
“Ah, how good it is to be among people who are reading!” – Rainer Maria Rilke
“Along with the love of style, I read in the hope of laughter, exaltation, insight, enhanced consciousness, and dare I say it, wisdom; I read, finally, hoping to get a little smarter about the world.” – Joseph Epstein, “The Pleasures of Reading,” in Narcissus Leaves the Pool, 1999
“Reading is escape, and the opposite of escape; it’s a way to make contact with reality after a day of making things up, and it’s a way of making contact with someone else’s imagination after a day that’s all too real. Reading is grist. Reading is bliss.” – Nora Ephron
