Top 100 Be A Reader Quotes
#1. No method nor discipline can supersede the necessity of being forever on the alert. What is a course of history, or philosophy, or poetry, or the most admirable routine of life, compared with the discipline of looking always at what is to be seen? Will you be a reader, a student merely, or a seer?
Henry David Thoreau
#2. If the writer were more like a reader, he'd be a reader, not a writer. It's as uncomplicated as that.
Julian Barnes
#4. Before you can become a writer, you have to be a reader, and a reader of everything, at that. To the best of my recollection, I became a reader at the age of 10 and have never stopped. Like many authors, I read all sorts of books all the time, and it is amazing how the mind fills up.
Terry Pratchett
#5. There's a new star in the YA firmament - A. K. Downing's series, beginning with Into The Air, is sure to be a reader favorite right up there with The Hunger Games and The 100 trilogy.
Richard Snodgrass
#7. I know for sure,to be a leader i have to be a reader
Faiz Triumph
#9. I can give advice to anyone interested in writing in one word: Read! I think it's much more important to be a reader than to be a writer!
Linda Sue Park
#10. Read as widely and as deeply as you can. You have to be a reader before you can be a writer.
Y.S. Lee
#11. What is your suggestion for someone who wants to start writing? Be a reader. It's the only real way to learn how to tell a story.
Natalie Babbitt
#12. If you would be a reader, read; if a writer, write.
Epictetus
#13. If you want to be a writer, you have to be a reader first.
Austin Kleon
#15. Editing is simply the application of the common sense of any good reader. That's why, to be an editor, you have to be a reader. It's the number one qualification.
Robert Gottlieb
#16. If you want to be a writer, I have two pieces of advice. One is to be a reader. I think that's one of the most important parts of learning to write. The other piece of advice is 'Just do it!' Don't think about it, don't agonize, sit down and write.
S.E. Hinton
#17. Not every reader is a leader, but every leader must be a reader.
Harry S. Truman
#18. If you would be a writer, first be a reader. Only through the assimilation of ideas, thoughts and philosophies can one begin to focus his own ideas, thoughts and philosophies.
Allan W. Eckert
#19. To be a writer, you must be a reader, yet as many as 30 per cent of my writing students were not readers.
Garry Disher
#20. Every reader of your ad is interested, else he would not be a reader. You are dealing with someone willing to listen. Then do your level best. That reader, if you lose him now, May never again be a reader
Claude C. Hopkins
#21. Did you ever want to be a writer?" "No," she said, and she would have told him. "I only wanted to be a reader.
Ann Patchett
#22. I'm not saying that you have to be a reader to save your soul in the modern world. I'm saying it helps.
Walter Mosely
#23. I have a passion for teaching kids to become readers, to become comfortable with a book, not daunted. Books shouldn't be daunting, they should be funny, exciting and wonderful; and learning to be a reader gives a terrific advantage.
Roald Dahl
#24. Reader, I am myself the subject of my book; you would be unreasonable to spend your leisure on so frivolous and so vain a matter.
Bernard Malamud
#25. I ought to be able to invent words capable of blowing the odor of corpses in a direction other than straight into mine and the reader's face.
Franz Kafka
#26. As a writer, you're making a pact with the reader; you're saying, 'Look, I know and you know that if this book was really a murder investigation, it would be a thousand pages long and would be very dull, and you would be very unhappy with the ending.'
Mark Billingham
#27. A reader ought to be able to hold it and become familiar with its organized contents and make it a mind's manageable companion.
William Safire
#28. The writing can be its own reward, as you discover more things that you can do. It counts a lot, though, when a story connects with a reader and they take the time to tell me about it.
Nick Earls
#29. Picture books are for everybody at any age, not books to be left behind as we grow older. The best ones leave a tantalising gap between the pictures and the words, a gap that is filled by the reader's imagination, adding so much to the excitement of reading a book.
Anthony Browne
#30. Don't hedge your prose with little timidities. Good writing is lean and confident ... Every little qualifier whittles away some fraction of the reader's trust. Readers want a writer who believes in himself and in what he is saying. Don't diminish that belief. Don't be kind of bold. Be bold.
William Zinsser
#31. Ordering is difficult. It's like arranging pieces of music in a concert: What do you put first? What do you put after the intermission? I want the reader to be sort of surprised, to come to each story freshly.
Lydia Davis
#32. If you are writing a thriller with violence in it, the ending must be violent. You are delivering a promise to your reader.
Gayle Lynds
#33. You will never be a leader in any area of your life if you are not a reader in those areas of life.
Jim George
#34. Instapaper wouldn't be of as much value if it weren't for these mobile and e-reader devices. They give you a separate physical context for reading.
Marco Arment
#35. Writing is a unique art-form. You are painting a detailed image in someone's mind, and it will be different for every single reader.
Giuseppe Bianco
#36. No book that is written for an external purpose is going to be a passionately felt book for the writer or the reader. I don't see the point in doing that.
Elizabeth Kostova
#37. To walk into a modern-day bookstore is a little bit like studying a single photograph out of the infinite number of photographs that cold be taken of the world: It offers the reader a frame.
Nicole Krauss
#38. I have the Sony Reader; I have the Kindle as well. I don't really use either of them, to be honest. I'd rather sit down with a cup of coffee and a newspaper than read all my digital books.
Chad Hurley
#39. if you want to be a great writer, you have to be a greed reader.
Imelda Akmal
#40. A lot of people assume you can think better with a slow diet of books, but that will not be the case for every reader. I prefer inundation.
Tony Reinke
#41. Few authors understand themselves, and a proper reader must not only understand his author but also be able to see beyond him
Johann Georg Hamann
#42. I've often said the reader knows every bit as much about Thorne as I do. When I created him for 'Sleepyhead,' I was determined he should be a character who would develop, book by book, change and grow as we all do, and who - crucially - would be unpredictable.
Mark Billingham
#43. This would be my first time wanting to slaughter a reader, but then again, I can pretend she's one of those cranky ass reviewers that think they are literary gods.
Adam Reese
#44. READ. You have no business wanting to be a writer unless you are a reader. You should read fantasies and essays, biographies and poetry, fables and fairy tales. Read, read, read, read, read.
Kate DiCamillo
#45. Theoretically speaking a good reader should also be a good learner, whatever the century and the place!
Carl William Brown
#46. I look for two things when I am about to launch into a book. First, there has to be a dramatic arc to the story itself that will carry me, and the reader, from beginning to end. Second, the story has to weave through larger themes that can illuminate the world of the subject.
David Maraniss
#47. Fiction, if done right, can bridge cultural divides. Stories can be a footpath for a reader to step into another land and view its indigenous practices and beliefs through a local lens, instead of a telescope.
Nadia Hashimi
#48. If I can be more efficient, I'm actually being more respectful to the reader, which then implies a greater intimacy with the reader.
George Saunders
#49. With a novel, you're the director and the screenwriter and everything else, except that you have to write it knowing it will all be performed inside the head of the reader. So it's a difficult and lonely task.
Jason Henderson
#50. Put your manuscript down, I'd recommend at least two months. Six would be ideal. You really need to get away from it long enough to change your mindset. Unless you have a photographic memory, this technique will work. You'll transform into the one thing you crave feedback from: a reader.
A.J. Flowers
#51. We can live in a society founded on the book and yet not read, or we can live in a society where the book is merely an accessory and be, in the deepest, truest sense, a reader.
Alberto Manguel
#52. If any reader has lost a loved one or is afraid of death, modern physics says: 'Be comforted, you and they shall live again.'
Frank Tipler
#53. It is hard to create a first-person narrator that can be a child and yet is able to take in enough information for the narrative to be legible to the reader.
Akhil Sharma
#54. I think, basically, what I'm good for is reading - a lot. I think I'll always be more of a reader than a writer, definitely. There are sooo many books in the world I haven't read, sometimes I feel as if they're all piled on top of my head weighing me down and saying, 'Hurry up.'
Helen Oyeyemi
#55. What I see in the book is an exquisite form of technology: one that doesn't require a power source and can be passed from hand to hand and lasts a lot longer than an electronic reader.
Louise Erdrich
#56. If a book is worth reading, it will most probably be worth reading twice.
Aman Jassal
#57. Picture to yourself, O fair young reader, a worldly, selfish, graceless, thankless, religionless old woman, writhing in pain and fear, and without her wig. Picture her to yourself, and ere you be old, learn to love and pray.
William Makepeace Thackeray
#58. Authors have established it as a kind of rule, that a man ought to be dull sometimes; as the most severe reader makes allowances for many rests and nodding-places in a voluminous writer.
Joseph Addison
#60. The opening lines of a book are so important. You really need to somehow charm your reader. If you can't get her attention in the first pages, you may have lost her. There has to be an ambience.
Tatiana De Rosnay
#61. I was a voracious reader, but part of what that taught me was that I was nowhere near as scholarly as I wanted to be. I was precocious, but how many years beyond your teens can you be called that with sincerity?
Carrie Fisher
#62. No reflecting reader can deny that the passing off, on an unsuspecting listener, of noises for words, or symbols, must be classified as a fraud, or that we pass to the other fellow contagious semantic disturbances.
Alfred Korzybski
#63. When you want to touch the reader's heart, try to be colder. It gives their grief as it were, a background, against which it stands out in greater relief.
Anton Chekhov
#64. However, intention needn't enter in, and if a reader sees things in a religious way, and the work is dogmatically acceptable, then I don't see why it should not be interpreted in that way, as well as in others.
James Schuyler
#65. Hardly a book of human worth, be it heaven's own secret, is honestly placed before the reader; it is either shunned, given a Periclean funeral oration in a hundred and fifty words, or interred in the potter's field of the newspapers back pages.
Edward Dahlberg
#66. When you're so close to material, it would be as if you had come out of a bad marriage. You would be so close to it that you would be paying attention to detail that may not mean a whole lot for the reader.
Tim O'Brien
#67. The best critics do not worry about what the author might think. That would be like a detective worrying about what a suspect might think. Instead, they treat the reader as an intelligent friend, and describe the book as honestly, and as entertainingly, as possible.
Craig Brown
#68. The reader wants to be able to see the book as if they are watching a movie.
LaQuita Cameron
#69. You have to invest yourself as a reader to be a good writer.
Saru Singhal
#70. I put ordinary people in jeopardy and give them the opportunity to be heroic. Then there's a great payoff for the reader at the end, when the heroic character gets what he or she deserves. Readers will come back again and again if they feel satisfied at the end.
Terri Blackstock
#71. I can tell you that as a writer and as a reader, I regard character as king. Or queen. No matter how riveting the action or interesting the plot twists, if I don't feel like I'm meeting someone who feels real, I'm not going to be compelled to read further.
Maggie Stiefvater
#72. For a book to be a good one a reader must have a connection with the characters and identify with them and have the story hold their attention and want more
Brenda Kay Winters
#73. Sometimes a book is better than it ever had a right to be because of the history the reader brings to the reading and because of the methods educators use to bring a particular story alive.
Chris Crutcher
#74. A reader seldom peruses a book with pleasure until he knows whether the writer of it be a black man or a fair man, of a mild or choleric disposition, married or a bachelor.
Joseph Addison
#75. I don't think about the gender of my readers or about reader expectations. I'm frankly scared to. I figured out a long time ago that if I tried to guess the audience, it would be like me trying to guess which stocks to buy.
Robert Crais
#77. I don't think it has ever occurred to her that a text is written above all to be read and to arouse emotions in the reader.
Muriel Barbery
#78. Learning how to be a good reader is what makes you a writer.
Zadie Smith
#79. There are many rules of good writing, but the best way to find them is to be a good reader.
Stephen E. Ambrose
#80. Writers, because they write, are condemned never to be readers of their own stories ... The memory of first putting a story into words will always prevent writers from reading their work as an ordinary reader would.
Elena Ferrante
#81. This skipping is another important point. It should be done whenever a proof seems too hard or whenever a theorem or a whole paragraph does not appeal to the reader. In most cases he will be able to go on and later he may return to the parts which he skipped.
Emil Artin
#83. The MFA program did one great thing for me: It taught me how to be a better reader and critic. Nothing I wrote during my time at Columbia remains - but learning how to really deconstruct a work of fiction - that, of course, is a permanent part of me now.
Dinaw Mengestu
#84. In college, you're kind of designing who you want to be. And I wanted to be a big reader.
Josh Radnor
#85. A reader's emotions can be sparked with few words. That's the power of dialogue.
Sol Stein
#86. In a country this large and a language even larger ... there ought to be a living for somebody who cares and wants to entertain and instruct a reader.
John Updike
#87. I try to be a lot of things for the authors I work with - a careful reader, a helpful friend who also happens to be an experienced writer, a thoughtful editor, and a creative midwife.
Kevin Sampsell
#88. I was impressed for the ten thousandth time by the fact that literature illuminates life only for those to whom books are a necessity. Books are unconvertible assets, to be passed on only to those who possess them already.
Anthony Powell
#89. I've seen the odd tarot reader and had my palm read in various countries and explained to me in many strains of broken English. Did I believe a word? To be honest, I didn't understand much, but I loved watching the presentation.
Simon Baker
#90. In Victorian fiction, there would be a chapter at the end devoted to righting all of the wrongs. I thought to right all of the wrongs would be too glib. I thought it would be better to lull the reader into thinking that is the way it would work, but then not to do that.
Charles Palliser
#91. All we need to do, reader or writer, from first line to final page, is be as open as a book, and be alive to the life in language - on all its levels.
Ali Smith
#92. You can't be up the reader's ass, as many a writer I think is - cute as hell, ingratiating as hell. But that's not loving the reader in the right way. That's toadying to the reader.
Martin Amis
#93. Type design moves at the pace of the most conservative reader. The good type-designer therefore realizes that, for a new font to be successful, it has to be so good that only very few recognize its novelty.
Stanley Morison
#94. It is as true for the writer as for the reader that any novel worth its ink should be an experience first and foremost - not an essay, not a statement, not an orderly rollout of themes and propositions. All of which is to say: stories, too, are wild things.
David Wroblewski
#95. If a book I've committed myself to review turns out to be 'disappointing' I make an effort to present it objectively to the reader, including a good number of excerpts from the text, so that the reader might form his or her own opinion independent of my own.
Joyce Carol Oates
#96. For every work of fiction, the author inserts a bit of themself to make the story seem more real. For every work of nonfiction, the edges of reality must be blurred creatively to keep the reader's interest.
A.K. Wallace
#97. I have my cards read every time I pass a tarot-reader booth. I would be so embarrassed to have one of those 900 numbers appear on my phone bill, because I don't know how I would explain it to my business manager. It would almost be like saying, 'Okay, I'm white trash.'
Jennifer Tilly
#98. Choosing the narrator for a first-person story like 'Downriver' is a crucial decision because the voice has to be one the reader wants to listen to, and the voice has to be a match for the emotion you want the story to carry.
Will Hobbs
#99. I like Beryl Bainbridge a great deal, and she is a writer who absolutely demands to be read a second, third, and fourth time. I admire her great courage in leaving so much unsaid and asking the reader to really engage her brain.
Monica Ali
#100. If a writer is any good, what he makes will have its source in a realm much larger than that which his conscious mind can encompass and will always be a greater surprise to him than it can ever be to his reader.
Flannery O'Connor
