Top 71 Being A Reader Quotes
#1. She was the reason I was a reader, and being a reader was what had made me most myself; it had given me the gifts of curiosity and sympathy, an awareness of the world as an odd and vibrant contradictory place, and it had me unafraid of its oddness and vibrancy and contradictions.
Curtis Sittenfeld
#2. No one ever became, or can become truly eloquent without being a reader of the Bible, and an admirer of the purity and sublimity of its language.
Fisher Ames
#3. Being a reader is sort of like being president, except reading involves fewer state dinners, usually. You have this agenda you want to get through, but you get distracted by life events, e.g., books arriving in the mail/World War III, and you are temporarily deflected from your chosen path.
Nick Hornby
#4. If there had been a job of being a reader, I would have taken that, because I love to read and I don't love to write. That would be blissful.
Fran Lebowitz
#6. I think it's difficult for young people to acknowledge being smart, to knowledge being a reader. I see kids who are embarrassed to read books. They're embarrassed to have people see them doing it.
Walter Dean Myers
#7. The question isn't whether I have time to read or not (time that nobody will ever give me, by the way), but whether I'll allow myself the pleasure of being a reader.
Daniel Pennac
#8. What is clear is that being a reader/fanboy (for lack of a better term) helped him get through the rough days of his youth, but it also made him stick out in the mean streets of Paterson even more than he already did.
Junot Diaz
#9. Writing is something that I've always loved. That stems from my love of being a reader.
Jen Lancaster
#10. I wanted to be a librarian from a very young age. Some of my earliest memories are being taken to the local library. I ended up working as a bookseller. Becoming a writer was the logical offshoot of being a reader.
Michael Scott
#11. 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
#12. If you are a reader, you are already halfway to being a writer," she says. "For you have a love of words and pleasure from seeing them on a page. And if you are a writer, then you will find that you are driven to write. It is a gift that demands to be shared. You cannot be a silent singer.
Philippa Gregory
#13. Being a librarian certainly helped me with my writing because it made me even more of a reader, and I was always an enthusiastic reader. Writing and reading seem to me to be different aspects of a single imaginative act.
Margaret Mahy
#14. A novel is a long confession in which you expose your heartaches, complain about all the things that are wrong in the world, then try to put those things right for the sake of the reader, as well as your own well being.
Chloe Thurlow
#15. I've been a Marvel reader since I was just a kid, and I've dreamed of being a Marvel writer for almost as long, so being tapped to officially join the team is truly something.
Charles Soule
#16. Consistent with the liberal views of the Enlightenment, Leibniz was an optimist with respect to human reasoning and scientific progress. Although he was a great reader and admirer of Spinoza, Leibniz, being a confirmed deist, rejected emphatically Spinoza's pantheism.
Shelby D. Hunt
#17. What makes a writer successful is not money or fame (though both are nice) ... it's that in being true to her or himself, the words were able to connect to a reader's heart.
Miyoko Hikiji
#18. When I was little, I was a voracious reader, and that really led me to acting as well. I loved being transported into someone else's life, and that's what reading provided me. I also really love to entertain people.
Autumn Reeser
#19. Proust is a hero of mine. I read 'A la recherche' in one go, and I'm a very slow reader. It had an astonishing impact, reading it on my own and being my main company. I think Proust is the most intelligent person to ever have written a novel.
Edward St. Aubyn
#20. Minimalism has a connotation of being reductive, and not in the best way. 'Brevetist' is a better term. I'm trying to be as concise as possible and still getting across to the reader. When information is delivered in that way, it is very satisfying to me.
Susan Minot
#21. There should really not be anything gratuitous in a work of art. Sometimes what seems as if it's gratuitous may be a passage in which a character is being characterized so that the reader comes to know him or her better.
Joyce Carol Oates
#22. The truth is, everything ultimately comes down to the relationship between the reader and the writer and the characters. Does or does not a character address moral being in a universal and important way? If it does, then it's literature.
Whitley Strieber
#23. I'm a reader of Chinese literature, I like their films, but also: I've had great difficulty getting my work published in China; very little of it has been published there. The first two attempts to have all of my work published, for instance, were refused without any reason ever being given.
Salman Rushdie
#24. A simple Bible reader and sermon hearer who is full of the Holy Spirit will develop a far deeper acquaintance with his God and Savior than a more learned scholar who is content with being theologically correct.
J.I. Packer
#25. I do think there's a relationship between a book and a reader that's more intimate, in many ways, than the relationship between an audience member and a play - just by the nature of it being an object that you can have in bed with you and that you can keep and page through.
Sarah Ruhl
#26. Before, being a model, it was just a job, and I was making fun of it. But today, I take my career more seriously. The fact that a reader may buy an Armani item because she'd seen it on me in a magazine is very important to me. So much so that I intend to launch my own label.
Milla Jovovich
#27. I came up with new leads for game stories by being observant and clever, by using the many gifts of the English language to intrigue and hook a reader.
Dick Schaap
#28. I've just always been a reader. My grandmother just expressed the importance of literacy, if I said that correctly. She just always expressed the importance of being able to write and being able to read.
Kevin Gates
#29. Guerrilla ontology The basic technique of all my books . Ontology is the study of being; the guerrilla approach is to so mix the elements of each book that the reader must decide on each page 'How much of this is real and how much is a put-on?
Robert Anton Wilson
#30. It was like being trapped forever in the present tense of the first line of a first reader.
Craig Raine
#31. I think there's a fine line between being so obtuse that you lose the reader completely, which is the intention for some writers, though it isn't mine. I work hard at grounding the world as much as possible in the world we do recognize.
Laurie Foos
#32. It's funny: I like being surprised as a reader, so it's difficult for me to spoil my own stuff.
Marc Guggenheim
#33. I write for somebody who has my own limitations. My reader has a certain difficulty with concentrating, which in my case comes from being a film viewer.
Manuel Puig
#34. The object we call a book is not the real book, but its potential, like a musical score or seed. It exists fully only in the act of being read; and its real home is in the head of the reader, where the symphony resounds, the seed germinates.A book is a heart that beats in the chest of another.
Rebecca Solnit
#35. Consciously or unconsciously, the reader is dissatisfied with being told only what is not; the reader wishes to be told what is ... If your every sentence admits a doubt, your writing will lack authority.
William Strunk Jr.
#36. I was first a reader and without readers what would be the point in writing. For those of you who love a good story, thank you for being willing to read what we writerly folk create.
Michelle Dennis Evans
#37. That said, being dyslexic, I wasn't a great reader when I was kid.
Richard Ford
#38. Lucky are you, reader, if you happen not to be of that sex to whom it is forbidden all good things; to whom liberty is denied; to whom almost all virtues are denied; lucky are you if you are one of those who can be wise without its being a crime.
Marie De Gournay
#39. He sat there studiously bent over his work (Bill saw him), which lay in a slant of crisp white winterlight, his face sober and absorbed, knowing that to be a librarian was to come as close as any human being can to sitting in the peak-seat of eternity's engine.
Stephen King
#40. I suppose anyone who has ever written a travel book has had the experience of being accosted by a reader with blood in his eye and a lawsuit in his voice.
Ilka Chase
#41. People who have had a stroke and are recovering from it love being read to ... especially by someone who is a good reader - it does help them to get better.
Ruth Rendell
#42. Risk is important to me as a writer, reader, and editor. I love stories that take a premise or style that seems unlikely to succeed, whose first paragraphs risk a raised eyebrow or groan, and whose last paragraphs are then all that much sweeter a triumph. Basically, I love being proved wrong.
Caitlin Horrocks
#43. [L]et my reader who is puzzled by my awkward explanations close his eyes for no more than two minutes, and see if he does not find himself suddenly not a compact human being at all, but only a consciousness on a sea of sound and touch ...
Shirley Jackson
#44. 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
#45. Libraries have had a long history of dealing with authoritarian organizations demanding reader records - who's read what - and this has led to people being rounded up and killed.
Brewster Kahle
#46. A book being read is a transaction between author & reader, a sharing, giving, taking & a reimagining of the author's offering.
Mark Rubinstein
#47. I think the trick of being a writer is to basically put your cards out there all the time and be willing to be as in the dark about what happens next as your reader would be at that time.
George Saunders
#48. A ghost story of which the scene is laid in the twelfth or thirteenth century may succeed in being romantic or poetical: it will never put the reader into the position of saying to himself: If I'm not careful, something of this kind may happen to me!
M.R. James
#49. It is a fact that, being a quick reader, apart from enabling a person to study good books such as Macaulay and Gibbon, enables a person to read a lot of bad books as well.
Antonia Fraser
#50. I never studied writing, but I'd always been a reader and had a secret fantasy about being a writer.
Jon Krakauer
#51. Working as an editor was like being a professional reader, and the better I became at reading the better I became at writing.
Karen Thompson Walker
#52. As a reader myself, which precedes my being a writer, of course, I read in order to enter another world.
Lynne Tillman
#53. I don't remember being a keen reader, but apparently I was. My aunt told me that whenever I was teased for reading, I would say, "To each his own."
Sefi Atta
#54. The purpose of a short story is ... that the reader shall come away with the satisfactory feeling that a particular insight into human character has been gained, or that his (or her) knowledge of life has been deepened, or that pity, love or sympathy for a human being is awakened.
Lin Yutang
#55. Through writing, an author opens the window of his heart through which a reader can see the inner self of the author.
Debasish Mridha
#56. Some of the writers I admire who seem very, very funny and very emotional to me can develop a closeness with the reader without giving too much of themselves away. Lorrie Moore comes to mind, as does David Sedaris. When they write, the reader thinks that they're being trusted as a friend.
Sloane Crosley
#57. I am becoming increasingly difficult to please as a reader, but I adore being surprised by a really wonderful book, written by someone I've never heard of before.
Alexandra Fuller
#58. You learn to write by writing, and by reading and thinking about how writers have created their characters and invented their stories. If you are not a reader, don't even think about being a writer.
Jean M. Auel
#59. I was a terrible reader as a kid. I mean terrible. Super slow and very unfocused. It took me forever to read a book, and I remember being well into high school and still needing my mom to sit down and read aloud to me so I could pass my English tests and such.
John Corey Whaley
#60. 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
#61. 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
#62. I am intrigued and even moved by the idea of being right with the reader in the actuality that she or he is reading a poem. So the titles are an acknowledgment of the reality and value of that act in the world.
Matthew Zapruder
#63. And a more foolish notion can scarcely be imagined, it being obvious that the reader is only informed of what the writer wishes him to know, and is thus seduced into believing almost anything.
Iain Pears
#64. Libraries made me - as a reader, as a writer, and as a human being.
Laurie R. King
#65. In film, a lot of the time you're not as engaged, it is all being given to you, and you're accepting it as it comes in, but in comics, as a reader, you are going to have to work, your imagination needs to do an awful lot.
Neil Gaiman
#66. I like moral judgment to emerge from the reader. We are being sold a very simplistic morality by our leaders at a time when nuance and understanding are at a premium.
Hari Kunzru
#67. Dylan Landis knows how to unnerve a reader, even as she's appreciating being unnerved. Rainey Royal thrums with sex and power. A brave, exquisite book.
Mary Kay Zuravleff
#68. ...as a child, I was an avid reader. And despite reading hundreds of books about straight people, I did not grow up to embrace the heterosexual lifestyle. Similarly, someone who is heterosexual is not going to turn gay from reading a book that features a child being raised by two moms.
Leslea Newman
#69. Children know when they are being sold a sanitised version of the world, and I think that's a betrayal of the relationship between author and reader.
Morris Gleitzman
#70. If your reader has been given a rousing opening, he will usually then sit still for at least some exposition. But be sure to follow that chunk of telling with one or more dramatized scenes. That's much more effective than being given section after section of telling.
Nancy Kress
#71. No one is better than anyone else. Some just simply don't fulfil their potential of being the best they possibly can.
S.A. Tawks
Famous Authors
Popular Topics
Scroll to Top
