Top 100 I Read Books Because Quotes
#1. [I] read books because I love them, not because I think I should read them.
Simon Van Booy
#2. I teach myself archaeology, I teach myself Spanish, and that's because it can be fun, it can be useful. So I keep studying. I read books because I still want to study. I don't want to stop.
Philippe Falardeau
#3. Thanks for being the kind of person who likes to pick up a book. That's a genuinely great thing. I met a librarian recently who said she doesn't read because books are her job and when she goes home, she just wants to switch off. I think we can agree that that's creepy as hell.
Max Barry
#4. I'd forced books on my kids from the day they were born and, as it turned out, it had been completely unnecessary because all of them liked to read. Or maybe they liked to read because I'd read aloud nearly every children's book in print.
Jeff Shelby
#5. He doesn't understand that books don't get used up. I've tried to explain that they aren't like clothes or furniture - that we keep them because we might want to read them again. And because they remind us of how we felt when we read them.
Paula Marantz Cohen
#6. I'm not big on reading business books. I get copies of all of them, because people want me to put a comment on the jacket. Every once in a while, I'll get interested and read one all the way through.
James Goodnight
#7. Oh! No, I only mean what I have read about. It always puts me in mind of the country that Emily and her father travelled through, in The Mysteries of Udolpho. But you never read novels, I dare say?" "Why not?" "Because they are not clever enough for you - gentlemen read better books.
Jane Austen
#8. I was the biggest Harry Potter fan. I read all the books. Ron was always my favorite character, because I feel like I relate to him, like weve both got red hair, we both like sweets, weve both got lots of brothers and sisters. Ive got one brother and three sisters, and both scared of spiders.
Rupert Grint
#9. I love reading; I really enjoy it. I read books quite fast, which kind of annoys me, but I like it at the same time because I can read a book in a day.
Ed Oxenbould
#10. I don't travel and tell stories, because that's not the way these days. But I write my books to be read aloud, and I think of myself in that oral tradition.
Louis L'Amour
#11. None of the books were in alphabetical order, which made it necessary to cock my head sideways to read each one of the spines. By the end of the third shelf I began to realize why librarians were sometimes able to achieve such pinnacle levels of crankiness: It's because they're in agony.
Alan Bradley
#12. I don't read my books, I write them. Once I've finished the many years it usually takes me to write them, I can't bear to read them, because I've spent too long with them already. I'm not advertising them very well, am I?
Salman Rushdie
#13. I hope that readers will tear through my books because they can't stop themselves - and then, maybe, read them again and find new things there.
Helen Dunmore
#14. I was always furious because you couldn't take out more than three books in one day. You would go home with your three books and read them and it would still be only five o'clock. The library didn't shut till half past, but you couldn't change the books till the next day.
Fay Weldon
#15. I don't read thrillers, romance or mystery, and I don't read self-help books because I don't believe in shortcuts and loopholes.
Isabel Allende
#16. When the whole world reads your books, is there any other happiness for a writer? I am happy that my books are read in 57 languages. But I am focused on Istanbul not because of Istanbul but because of humanity. Everyone is the same in the end.
Orhan Pamuk
#17. My advice is this. For Christ's sake, don't write a book that is suitable for a kid of 12 years old, because the kids who read who are 12 years old are reading books for adults. I read all of the James Bond books when I was about 11, which was approximately the right time to read James Bond books.
Terry Pratchett
#18. I've never read any of the '50 Shades of Grey' books because the Internet pre-educated me about the 'my inner goddess is doing the merengue with some salsa moves' material.
Andrea Seigel
#19. I dont like any of them, because they don't read the books. In Kiss Me Deadly my story is better than his story. Anthony Quinn played in The Lond Wait and he didn't read the book either.
Mickey Spillane
#20. I read the three 'Hunger Games' books in a week and because I liked them so much I wrote 'Just a Game.'
Birdy
#21. I don't actually talk about my books much, because I find if I talk about them I don't want to write them anymore. I write to find out what happens. You know how you read a book? That's what I'm doing except I'm just doing it a lot slower because it takes a lot longer to do.
Charles De Lint
#22. I would love to be in 'The Hunger Games.' I'm one of the few people who haven't read the books, because unfortunately, I'm not a big book reader. I do read a lot of scripts and I read the script and I loved it. So, yeah, I'd love to be in 'The Hunger Games.'
Cassi Thomson
#23. I don't think anybody should read anything except for fun because you won't learn anything unless you enjoy it.
Alasdair Gray
#24. Any writer who gives a reader a pleasurable experience is doing every other writer a favor because it will make the reader want to read other books. I am all for it.
S.E. Hinton
#25. Readers in general are not fond of dialect, and I don't blame them. I've read books myself that I've had to put down because sounding out every speech gave me a headache.
Susanna Kearsley
#26. I don't give books as gifts. Books are extremely personal, and I would hate to give someone a book that they don't like or want, because it would break my heart if they didn't read it.
Meg Cabot
#28. My whole thing is that I want to explore why you read books, what's the purpose of reading, and maybe that it's not that cool to hate something just because it's popular.
Josh Radnor
#29. I've read all the 'Game of Thrones' books many times over, so I sometimes find it easier being on set, because it can be hard to get out of character.
Emilia Clarke
#30. I did end up becoming a drawer, a sketcher and a painter because of comic books, but I didn't read them. Not at all.
Jesse L. Martin
#31. I find Facebook absolutely fascinating because I don't think there's ever been any one source that had so much information about each of us - who we talk to, who our friends are, what books we read, what we're buying, what movies we saw, what our travel is.
Rick Smolan
#32. I do not read for I have renounced life, I read because one life is just not enough for me.
Abbas Al-Akkad
#33. I had no ambition to be a writer because the books I read were too good, my standards were too high.
Haruki Murakami
#34. I read a lot, all the time, but often I read books for research, or because they're interesting to me in some way, even if they aren't exactly 'pleasurable.'
Gretchen Rubin
#35. Because when I read, I don't really read; I pop a beautiful sentence into my mouth and suck it like a fruit drop, or I sip it like a liqueur until the thought dissolves in me like alcohol, infusing brain and heart and coursing on through the veins to the root of each blood vessel.
Bohumil Hrabal
#36. Did they teach you how to pronounce 'Avada Kedavra' when you bought it?" I ask. Victor just stares at me. Probably because he's never read any of the Harry Potter books.
Jenny Lawson
#37. I think the reason I'm a writer is because first, I was a reader. I loved to read. I read a lot of adventure stories and mystery books, and I have wonderful memories of my mom reading picture books aloud to me. I learned that words are powerful.
Andrew Clements
#38. I am drawn to writing books about magic and the supernatural because those are the types of books I like to read. I've written many short stories with realistic settings, and I certainly wouldn't rule out realistic novels in the future!
Cassandra Clare
#39. I think it's more important to write something that brings men back to reading than it is to write for people who already read. There's a reason men don't read, and it's because books don't serve men. It's time we produce books that serve men.
Chuck Palahniuk
#40. Many of the books I read, I had to read them in French, English, or Italian, because they hadn't been translated into Spanish.
Antonio Munoz Molina
#41. There is a somewhat time-worn joke about people taking up library work because they like to read : the joke consisting of the fact that librarians have so little time to read. But, I tell you, those who do not, and there are some, are in the wrong profession.
Mary Virginia Provines
#42. It was easy to get a job at the Cedar Bar because people came and went, but I didn't like the atmosphere. Instead, I got a job at Cooper Union Library. I stayed at Cooper Union for seven years; it was my salvation. While I worked there, I also read books of every kind.
Claes Oldenburg
#43. I turned the page in Slaughterhouse Five, a forbidden book at Belmont because we were too young to read about soldiers swearing and bombs dropping and bodies blowing up and war sucking.
Laurie Halse Anderson
#44. When I say Afro-American aesthetic, I'm not just talking about the United States, I'm talking about the Americas. People in the Latin countries read my books because they share the same international aesthetic that I'm into and have been into for a long time. And it's multicultural.
Ishmael Reed
#45. You can't write a children's book that takes more than five or six minutes to read, because it will drive the parents batty. It has to be compact. Nobody thinks about the parents when they write these stupid books. I could write longer children's books, but it would actually be bad if I did.
Michael Ian Black
#46. I am always glad when any of my books can be put into an inexpensive edition, because I like to think that any people who might wish to read them can do so. Surely books ought to be within reach of everybody.
Pearl S. Buck
#47. I got interested in the question of literacy because writers are always moaning about why more people don't read books.
Robert Hass
#48. Sometimes I sensed that the books I read in rapid succession had set up some sort of murmur among themselves, transforming my head into an orchestra pit where different musical instruments sounded out, and I would realize that I could endure this life because of these musicales going on in my head.
Orhan Pamuk
#49. My parents would read those books to me as well but they used to make me starving when I was a kid because they were always eating ham sandwiches with the crusts off and drinking ginger beer.
Mike Myers
#50. If I don't have the books to read, if I don't have the information to study, how can I succeed? That's a lot of the stuff I would focus on if I was elected because I think knowledge is power.
Richard Sherman
#51. I have met thousands of children now, and not even one time has a child come up to me and said, 'Ms. Rowling, I'm so glad I've read these books because now I want to be a witch.'
J.K. Rowling
#52. I can remember no time when I did not understand that my mother must write books because people would have and read them; but I cannot remember one hour in which her children needed her and did not find her.
Elizabeth Stuart Phelps Ward
#53. My interest in books started as a child. I had a voracious appetite for reading. It's my mom's fault really, because she read to us a lot, and I loved it.
Catherine Cruzan
#54. It was an hour and a half plane ride, so I slept. I try to sleep because that's probably the only time I get to get my real sleep. When I can't sleep I read books or watch movies.
Keren Ann
#55. Some books I've kept because the binding is beautiful - I'm unlikely ever to read my grandmother's copy of 'The Life of Lord Nelson.' I'm addicted to secondhand bookshops.
Hari Kunzru
#56. I have a brother and sister; my mother does not care for thought, and father, too busy with his briefs to notice what we do. He buys me many books, but begs me not to read them, because he fears they joggle the mind.
Emily Dickinson
#57. The readers are the ones who let us live our dreams. I try to write books which are really compelling - that you'd take on vacation and rather than going out, you'd read in your hotel room because you had to find out what happened. Hopefully that's what readers are responding to.
Harlan Coben
#58. If I can avoid doing freelance work, I prefer to. Not just because it takes me away from drawing comics, but also because it's just annoying having to deal with art editors, and having to read people's articles or books or whatever.
Chester Brown
#59. Do you like Moby Dick?" he asks.
"I hate it," she says. "And I don't say that about many things. Teachers assign it, and parents are happy because their kids are reading something of 'quality.' But it's forcing kids to read books like that that make them think they hate reading.
Gabrielle Zevin
#60. I think people read travel books either because they intend to take that trip, or because they would never take that trip. In a sense, as a writer you are doing the travel for the reader.
Paul Theroux
#61. When my father first took me to Ennis Library I went down among the shelves and felt company, not only the company of writers, but the readers too, because they had lifted and opened and read these books. The books were worn in a way they can only get worn by hands and eyes and minds
Niall Williams
#62. Did you ever hear anyone say, 'That work had better be banned because I might read it and it might be very damaging to me'?
Joseph Henry Jackson
#63. My mother taught me how to read very early on and at school I was ahead of everyone in class. Reading was always something that I liked because I could do it alone and I was alone a lot of the time with my mother working the hours she did. Books became my friends very early on.
Henry Rollins
#64. I am always for getting a boy forward in his learning, for that is sure good. I would let him at first read any English book which happens to engage his attention; because you have done a great deal when you have brought him to have entertainment from a book. He'll get better books afterwards.
Samuel Johnson
#65. Do you ever hide books you've read over and over again because you're so sick of them?'
'Oh, definitely. When they ask for them, I say the book fairy came to get it. One time they saw one of the books at the library, so now they think the librarians are book fairies.
Gina Sheridan
#66. I'm a slow reader, but I usually get through seventy or eighty books a year, most fiction. I don't read in order to study the craft; I read because I like to read
Stephen King
#67. We didn't have a television, so I grew up with books. This isn't to suggest I'm an intellectual, but I do read a lot because part of acting is an exploration of literature.
Stephen Rea
#68. Some books that I've read on the Kindle, I've been like, 'I want that on my shelf.' Because it says, 'I'm the kind of person who has read this.' The kind of books that says, 'I'm serious and intellectual and historical and race-conscious.'
Jennifer Lee
#69. I sort of try to read the books when they come out impartially and not make up my mind, but the fact is when I was reading the sixth, 'Harry Potter And The Half-Blood Prince', there were bits in there where I was going, 'God, I would love to do that because it's so good'.
Daniel Radcliffe
#70. As an adolescent I wrote comic books, because I read lots of them, and fantasy novels set in Malaysia and Central Africa.
Umberto Eco
#71. Listen, my day job is also Chief Creative Officer for Marvel, and it's a very painful job because we publish a lot of books, and there are things I see where I can punch people out. Therefore, we have some new people now, and the kids are going to read our books.
Avi Arad
#72. It was a weird thing for me, because I don't read vampire books. I don't watch vampire movies. I'm not into the horror genre. I'm a wuss, I'm a scaredy cat.
Stephenie Meyer
#73. Things were about to change. If nothing changed, I wouldn't be writing this down because this is a book about the time when everything changed. And isn't that what every book is about? No, seriously, isn't it? I don't read books.
David Iserson
#74. I grew up with a very romantic, idealized vision of New York, probably because of all the books I read and the movies I watched.
Adrian Tomine
#75. It's strange because sometimes, I read a book, and I think I am the people in the book.
Stephen Chbosky
#76. Many people have told me that my books read like novels. Perhaps this is because, when I write, I feel I am really there, so strong is my feeling for my subject. On occasion, I have been so moved by the events I have been describing that I have felt like crying.
Alison Weir
#77. I have lived a thousand lives and I've loved a thousand loves. I've walked on distant worlds and seen the end of time. Because I read.
George R R Martin
#78. Mostly because I've realized what a lame teenager I was. I was always home at the stroke of midnight; I didn't like drinking mash; I didn't have sex. I read books and had an inferiority complex because I was afraid to do all that other stuff. I don't know anything about being a badass punk rocker.
Karin Tidbeck
#79. The truth is that I'm never sure how any of my books will be received, and because I can be thin-skinned, I try not to read too many reviews when a book first comes out.
Charles Baxter
#81. I never studied science or physics at school, and yet when I read complex books on quantum physics I understood them perfectly because I wanted to understand them. The study of quantum physics helped me to have a deeper understanding of the Secret, on an energetic level,
Rhonda Byrne
#82. I think part of why I have so many books around me and why I read every day is because I mythologize the writer. I don't do that with any other artists.
Philip Seymour Hoffman
#83. I'm a girl from Sweden. I took a lot of risks and went to New York by myself when I was 19 just because I read about it in a few books. I came here knowing nobody, having no money, and now I'm doing all these things like making records and videos every day.
Lykke Li
#84. I have this belief that children become readers before they can read. They become hooked on books because they were read aloud to as a child.
Jacqueline Wilson
#85. My work is less violent because we tend to write what we want to read ... and I'm not that interested in gruesome books. Any violence, to fit in well with a crime novel, has to have compassion.
Ann Cleeves
#86. If I were planning to be stranded on a desert island, I wouldn't take Freud's books with me, because I've already read them all.
Anne Roiphe
#87. And after I compose my programs, but it is very easy because I look to the music in a very natural way without fuss, and so I look always music, in my home, like books and books and books, choose books and you read the pages, so I do this with music, and I make programs.
Victoria De Los Angeles
#88. The books I write because I want to read them, the games because I want to play them, and stories I tell because I find them exciting personally.
Gary Gygax
#89. Back home I was considered a bookish girl because I had read eight or nine books. But when I came to the UK I met girls who had read hundreds. Now I realize I've read hardly anything at all, and I want to read all those hundreds of books.
Malala Yousafzai
#90. Name the book that made the biggest impression on you. I bet you read it before you hit puberty. In the time I've got left, I intend to write artistic books - for kids - because they're still open to new ideas.
Gary Paulsen
#91. And don't bother to deny it, because you just read it, so you have to be thinking about it. This is the way books work. Also? Velociraptors. Ha! I just made you think about velociraptors. Awesome. This is probably why Stephen King writes so many books. I am totally controlling your mind right now.
Jenny Lawson
#92. I asked her what a true story was because I thought that all stories were made up. She said a true story was called fact, and a made-up story was called ficton. Auntie May said a made-up story is a bit like telling lies, only the people who read them knew that already and so it didn't matter
Rebecca Lloyd
#93. I was never allowed to read the popular American children's books of my day because, as my mother said, the children spoke bad English without the author's knowing it.
Edith Wharton
#94. I read as if time were running out, because technically it is. As I grow older I find I'm increasingly impatient with mediocre entertainments; I want books that will take my breath away and realign my vision - Barbara Kingsolver
Pat Williams
#95. I don't read books on how to write screenplays just because I'm stubborn. So it's all sort of made up.
Shane Carruth
#96. I'm often told that money and spirituality are different things from people that don't have time to read spiritual books because they have to work for money.
Robin Sacredfire
#97. I love writing for young adults because they are such a wonderful audience, they are good readers, and they care about the books they read.
Katherine Paterson
#98. You get a little moody sometimes but I think that's because you like to read. People that like to read are always a little fucked up.
Pat Conroy
#99. My books are written from the heart, to entertain: they're books I would like to read. Because of that, when I meet people who like them, we have so much to talk about!
Nick Harkaway
#100. People place so much value on thought, but feeling is as essential. I want to read books that make me laugh and cry and fear and hope and punch the air in triumph. I want a book to hug me or grab me by the scruff of my neck. I don't even mind if it punches me in the gut. Because we are here to feel.
Matt Haig
