Reading famous quotes
Last updated: Sep 5, 2024
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All the best stories in the world are but one story in reality - the story of escape. It is the only thing which interests us all and at all times, how to escape.
-- A. C. Benson -
He [Hemingway] used a stand-up work place he had fashioned out of the top of of a bookcase near his bed. His portable typewriter was snugged in there and papers were spread along the top of the bookcase on either side of it. He used a reading board for longhand writing.
-- A. E. Hotchner -
Even when reading is impossible, the presence of books acquired (by passionate devotion to them) produces such an ecstasy that the buying of more books than one can peradventure read is nothing less than the soul reaching towards infinity ... we cherish books even if unread, their mere presence exudes comfort, their ready access, reassurance.
-- A. Edward Newton -
My reading list grows exponentially. Every time I read a book, it'll mention three other books I feel I have to read. It's like a particularly relentless series of pop-up ads.
-- A. J. Jacobs -
There is nothing nicer than nodding off while reading. Going fast asleep and then being woken by the crash of the book on the floor, then saying to yourself, well it doesn't matter much. An admirable feeling.
-- A. J. P. Taylor -
Besides the actual reading in class of many poems, I would suggest you do two things: first, while teaching everything you can and keeping free of it, teach that poetry is a mode of discourse that differs from logical exposition
-- A. R. Ammons -
Well, I would hardly say I do write as yet. But I write because I like words. I suppose if I liked stone I might carve. I like words. I like reading. I notice particular words. That sets me off.
-- A. S. Byatt -
Very young children eat their books, literally devouring their contents. This is one reason for the scarcity of first editions of Alice in Wonderland and other favorites of the nursery.
-- A. S. W. Rosenbach -
To read is to fly: it is to soar to a point of vantage which gives a view over wide terrains of history, human variety, ideas, shared experience and the fruits of many inquiries.
-- A.C. Grayling -
After the first few readings in comedy venues I did begin to write for laughs. There's something so gratifying about stimulating laughter.
-- Aaron Belz -
You may be sitting in a room reading this book. Imagine one note struck upon the piano. Immediately that one note is enough to change the atmosphere of the room - proving that the sound element in music is a powerful and mysterious agent, which it would be foolish to deride or belittle.
-- Aaron Copland -
I really wished he hadn't made me hate to read the Bible. Having it shoved down my throat all my life had made me bitter toward reading it. I believed it, but my dad had used it to his benefit too many times and ignored the parts in there that would point out his wrongs. Like judging Beau without even knowing him. That was in the Bible too.
-- Abbi Glines -
I read everything I could find: books and online. Sometimes bigger revelations came to me through finer details or something that you wouldn't pick up just by surface reading.
-- Abbie Cornish -
My father loved biographies. He loved the true tales of interesting people that were shaping our culture. I get why he dug Vanity Fair. You feel smarter, somehow, for reading it.
-- Abigail Spencer -
A capacity, and taste, for reading, gives access to whatever has already been discovered by others. It is the key, or one of the keys, to the already solved problems. And not only so. It gives a relish, and facility, for successfully pursuing the [yet] unsolved ones.
-- Abraham Lincoln -
Get books, sit yourself down anywhere, and go to reading them yourself.
-- Abraham Lincoln -
If you wish to be a lawyer, attach no consequence to the place you are in, or the person you are with; but get books, sit down anywhere, and go to reading for yourself. That will make a lawyer of you quicker than any other way.
-- Abraham Lincoln -
As a general rule, I abstain from reading reports of attacks upon myself, wishing not to be provoked by that to which I cannot properly offer an answer.
-- Abraham Lincoln -
A capacity and taste for reading gives access to whatever has already been discovered by others.
-- Abraham Lincoln -
Leafing through Forbes or Fortune [magazine]s is like reading the operating manual of a strangely sanctimonious pirate ship
-- Adam Gopnik -
I read to my kid, but I can't stand reading.
-- Adam Sandler -
I think the reason I don't read is because, when I'm reading, I feel like I'm missing out on something else. You know, What are my friends doing? Where's my girlfriend?
-- Adam Sandler -
By establishing reading societies, and subscription libraries, and taking these under our direction, and supplying them through our labors, we may turn the public mind which way we will.
-- Adam Weishaupt -
Today I fell asleep reading a book. The book is called INSOMNIA. I win.
-- Adam Young -
Reading is not an end to itself, but a means to an end.
-- Adolf Hitler -
The art of reading consists in remembering the essentials and forgetting non essentials.
-- Adolf Hitler -
I was thrilled to be able to read at three. I just thought everyone loved reading as much as I did.
-- Adora Svitak -
Perhaps the greatest lesson [Huxley] learned from reading Carlyle was that real religion, that emotive feeling for Truth and Beauty, could flourish in the absence of an idolatrous theology.
-- Adrian Desmond -
The maiden Olympics had more to protest about than mere war, though. Central to its ethos was a rejection of two establishments the political one, certainly, but also that of the wider poetry world itself. It changed poetry for ever in the UK, ... It led to readings all over the country. You suddenly got more women reading and publishing poems, as well as gay guys and poets from all over the world. Until that time, published poetry had been very university-based white, male, middle-class. We were trying to break poetry out of its academic confines.
-- Adrian Mitchell -
I loved to read, still do, and it seemed that the writing was a result of the love of books and reading and libraries.
-- Adriana Trigiani -
Intuition is like reading a word without having to spell it out. A child can't do that because it has had so little experience. A grown-up person knows the word because they've seen it often before.
-- Agatha Christie -
You have a tendency, Hastings, to prefer the least likely. That, no doubt, is from reading too many detective stories.
-- Agatha Christie -
Diaries tell their little tales with a directness, a candor, conscious or unconscious, a closeness of outlook, which gratifies our sense of security. Reading them is like gazing through a small clear pane of glass. We may not see far and wide, but we see very distinctly that which comes within our field of vision.
-- Agnes Repplier -
For my part, the good novel of character is the novel I can always pick up; but the good novel of incident is the novel I can never lay down.
-- Agnes Repplier -
You become a reader by reading the literature, not by reading the handbooks about it.
-- Aidan Chambers -
I cannot recall, in any of my reading, a single instance of a prophet who applied for the job.
-- Aiden Wilson Tozer -
When you're reading some of the great plays, when you do what I call "taking up with a writer," something happens.
-- Al Pacino -
Nothing worse than reading a love scene written by your father.
-- Alafair Burke -
Most of what makes a book 'good' is that we are reading it at the right moment for us.
-- Alain de Botton -
No matter how much time you spend reading books or following your intuition, you're gonna screw it up. Fifty times. You can't do parenting right.
-- Alan Arkin -
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. And 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 -
A book is a device to ignite the imagination.
-- Alan Bennett -
The appeal of reading, she thought, lay in its indifference: there was something undeferring about literature. Books did not care who was reading them or whether one read them or not. All readers were equal, herself included. Literature, she thought, is a commonwealth; letters a republic.
-- Alan Bennett -
Reading is untidy, discursive and perpetually inviting.
-- Alan Bennett -
The days weren't long enough for the reading she wanted to do.
-- Alan Bennett -
What she was finding also was how one book led to another, doors kept opening wherever she turned and the days weren't long enough for the reading she wanted to do.
-- Alan Bennett -
...she felt about reading what some writers felt about writing: that it was impossible not to do it and that at this late stage of her life she had been chosen to read as others were chosen to write.
-- Alan Bennett -
[B]riefing is not reading. In fact it is the antithesis of reading. Briefing is terse, factual and to the point. Reading is untidy, discursive and perpetually inviting. Briefing closes down a subject, reading opens it up.
-- Alan Bennett -
Authors, she soon decided, were probably best met within the pages of their novels, and were as much creatures of the reader's imagination as the characters in their books. Nor did they seem to think one had done them a kindness by reading their writings. Rather they had done one the kindness by writing them.
-- Alan Bennett -
To begin with, it's true, she read with trepidation and some unease. The sheer endlessness of books outfaced her and she had no idea how to go on; there was no system to her reading, with one book leading to another, and often she had two or three on the go at the same time.
-- Alan Bennett -
I write early in the morning, usually after reading portions of at least half a dozen newspapers on the web.
-- Alan Dean Foster -
Growing up, I never gave a thought to being a writer. All I ever wanted to be was a traveler and explorer. Science-fiction allowed me to go places that were otherwise inaccessible, which is why I started reading it.
-- Alan Dean Foster -
I have a bad tendency to get rapidly bored with my own material, so rewriting is hard for me. I mean, I already know the story and would rather read something new.
-- Alan Dean Foster -
I grew up reading genre writers, and to the degree that Eric Ambler and Graham Greene are genre writers, I'm a genre writer.
-- Alan Furst -
Computer literacy is a contact with the activity of computing deep enough to make the computational equivalent of reading and writing fluent and enjoyable. As in all the arts, a romance with the material must be well under way. If we value the lifelong learning of arts and letters as a springboard for personal and societal growth, should any less effort be spent to make computing a part of our lives?
-- Alan Kay -
I should have written books instead of reading them.
-- Alan Lightman -
When I'm 80 years old and sitting in my rocking chair, I'll be reading Harry Potter. And my family will say to me, 'After all this time?' And I will say, 'Always.
-- Alan Rickman -
Tokyo Heist is a fast-paced, exotic reading adventure, a story where The da Vinci Code meets the wildly popular manga genre! Author Diana Renn infuses protagonist Violet with plenty of chikara (power) and Renn's fresh, spot-on author's voice is irresistible. I couldn't put it down!
-- Alane Ferguson -
How did you . . . pass the time?’ Sunday asked. ‘You couldn’t just ching out of it, could you?’ ‘We had a different form of chinging,’ Eunice said. ‘An earlier type of virtual-reality technology, much more robust and completely unaffected by time lag. You may have heard of it. We called it “readingâ€.
-- Alastair Reynolds -
I cannot write in English, because of the treacherous spelling. When I am reading, I only hear it and am unable to remember what the written word looks like.
-- Albert Einstein -
The only thing that you absolutely have to know, is the location of the library.
-- Albert Einstein -
Thus I came...to a deep religiosity, which, however, reached an abrupt end at the age of 12. Through the reading of popular scientific books I soon reached a conviction that much in the stories of the Bible could not be true....Suspicion against every kind of authority grew out of this experience...an attitude which has never left me.
-- Albert Einstein -
Every reader exists to ensure for a certain book a modest immortality. Reading is, in this sense, a ritual of rebirth.
-- Alberto Manguel -
Libraries, whether my own or shared with a greater reading public, have always seemed to me pleasantly mad places, and for as long as I can remember I've been seduced by their labyrinthine logic, which suggests that reason (if not art) rules over a cacophonous arrangement of books.
-- Alberto Manguel -
Reading in bed is a self-centered act, immobile, free from ordinary social conventions, invisible to the world, and one that, because it takes place between the sheets, in the realm of lust and sinful idleness, has something of the thrill of things forbidden.
-- Alberto Manguel -
As centuries of dictators have known, an illiterate crowd is the easiest to rule; since the craft of reading cannot be untaught once it has been acquired, the second-best recourse is to limit its scope.
-- Alberto Manguel -
Each book was a world unto itself, and in it I took refuge.
-- Alberto Manguel -
The love of libraries, like most loves, must be learned.
-- Alberto Manguel -
The readers who commited suicide after reading 'Werther' were not ideal but merely sentimental readers.
-- Alberto Manguel -
Reading is the occupation of the insomniac par excellence.
-- Alberto Manguel -
For Borges, the core of reality lay in books; reading books, writing books, talking about books. In a visceral way, he was conscious of continuing a dialogue begun thousands of years before and which he believed would never end.
-- Alberto Manguel -
I quickly learned that reading is cumulative and proceeds by geometrical progression: each new reading builds upon whatever the reader has read before.
-- Alberto Manguel -
One can transform a place by reading in it.
-- Alberto Manguel -
The listeners who buy books after a reading multiply that reading; the author who realizes that he or she may be writing on a blank page but is at least not speaking to a blank wall may be encouraged by the experience, and write more.
-- Alberto Manguel -
It is in the translation that the innocence lost after the first reading is restored under another guise, since the reader is once again faced with a new text and its attendant mystery. That is the inescapable paradox of translation, and also its wealth.
-- Alberto Manguel -
The world that is a book is devoured bya reader who is a letter in the world's text; thus a circular metaphor is created for the endlessness of reading; We are what we read.
-- Alberto Manguel -
We read to understand, or to begin to understand. We cannot do but to read. Reading almost as much as breathing, is our essential function.
-- Alberto Manguel -
reading is at the beginning of the social contract
-- Alberto Manguel -
I never talked to anyone about my reading; the need to share came afterwords.
-- Alberto Manguel -
The American psychologist Julian Jaynes, in a controversial study on the origin of consciousness, argued that the bicameral mind - in which one of the hemispheres becomes specialized in silent reading - is a late development in humankind's evolution, and that the process by which this function develops is still changing.
-- Alberto Manguel -
Socrates affirmed that only that which the reader already knows can be sparked by a reading, and that the knowledge cannot be acquired through dead letters.
-- Alberto Manguel -
Words can be like X-rays if you use them properly -- they’ll go through anything. You read and you’re pierced.
-- Aldous Huxley -
Human contacts have been so highly valued in the past only because reading was not a common accomplishment.... The world, you must remember, is only just becoming literate. As reading becomes more and more habitual and widespread, an ever-increasing number of people will discover that books will give them all the pleasures of social life and none of its intolerable tedium.
-- Aldous Huxley -
A bad book is as much of a labor to write as a good one, it comes as sincerely from the author's soul.
-- Aldous Huxley -
Deprived of their newspapers or a novel, reading-addicts will fall back onto cookery books, on the literature which is wrapped around bottles of patent medicine, on those instructions for keeping the contents crisp which are printed on the outside of boxes of breakfast cereals. On anything.
-- Aldous Huxley -
... I had to depend on Braille for my reading and guide for my walking...I am now wearing no glasses, reading and all without strain...by taking lessons in seeing...optometrists hate the method...
-- Aldous Huxley -
After all, what is reading but a vice, like drink or venery or any other form of excessive self-indulgence? One reads to tickle and amuse one's mind; one reads, above all, to prevent oneself thinking.
-- Aldous Huxley -
Assemble a mob of men and women previously conditioned by a daily reading of the newspapers; treat them to amplified band music, bright lights...and in next to no time you can reduce them to a state of almost mindless subhumanity. Never before have so few been in a position to make fools, maniacs, or criminals of so many.
-- Aldous Huxley -
To read a newspaper is to refrain from reading something worth while. The first discipline of education must therefore be to refuse resolutely to feed the mind with canned chatter.
-- Aleister Crowley -
There is a logic [to my reading], but I can't define it. I like reading impulsively. I collect books, I have a lot of them, but most of them I have not read yet. I'll read them when they call me from the shelf.
-- Aleksandar Hemon -
Reading supplies bread for imagination to feed on and bones for it to chew on.
-- Alex Faickney Osborn -
I suppose that it was inevitable that my word-base broadened. I could now for the first time pick up a book and read and now begin to understand what the book was saying. Anyone who has read a great deal can imagine the new world that opened. Let me tell you something: from then until I left that prison, in every free moment I had, if I was not reading in the library, I was reading in my bunk. You couldn’t have gotten me out of my books with a wedge...Months passed without my even thinking about being imprisoned. In fact, up to then, I never had been so truly free in my life.
-- Alex Haley -
I remember reading Disturbia, one of the first scripts I ever got, and I go Pfft, who wants to make a movie about a guy in a house?
-- Alex Pettyfer -
Writers aren't born, they're made - from practice, reading, and a lot of caffeine.
-- Alexander Chee
