Top 100 Quotes About Reading Good Books
#1. Reading good books spoils you for enjoying bad books.
Annie Barrows
#2. Reading good books doesn't necessarily make one a good person - or a smarter, funnier, or more cultivated person, either.
Maureen Corrigan
#4. Reading good books is like engaging in conversation with the most cultivated minds of past centuries who had composed them, or rather, taking part in a well-conducted dialogue in which such minds reveal to us only the best of their thoughts.
Rene Descartes
#5. Reading good books implants good ideas in the mind, develops good aspirations, and leads to the cultivation of good friends.
Mas Oyama
#6. Our hope is that the elementary reading of comics will lead to the joy of reading good books.
Nelson Mandela
#7. One cannot be taught to write. One can only learn to write by writing - and reading. Reading good books written by real artists - until you understand why they are good.
Truman Capote
#8. I will spend my life traveling, laughing, drinking all kinds of tea, meeting new people, reading good books, growing things, creating beauty, eating chocolate, doing magic, making love and occasionally I will write something worth reading.
Brooke Hampton
#10. I can think of no habit, kept up through the years, that binds a married couple more than that of reading good books together. Domestic problems and personal problems are for the time forgotten, and an intellectual intimacy is established that can be maintained in few other ways.
Alice Hegan Rice
#11. Can I ask what you're reading?" ... She turned the book so the cover faced me. Wuthering Heights. "Have you read it?" She said. I nodded. I could feel the pulsating beat of my heart behind my eyes. "It's a sad story." "Sad stories make good books," She said. "They do.
Khaled Hosseini
#12. She ate toast in bed, then reread a favorite book, taking comfort from a story where she knew the outcome would be good and just and right.
Sarah Mayberry
#13. I took on a year of reading books for a reason. Because words are witness to life: they record what has happened, and they make it all real. Words create the stories that become history and become unforgettable. Even fiction portrays truth: good fiction is truth.
Nina Sankovitch
#14. The best of fiction, as we know, of course, doesn't tell the truth; it tales the truth.
Criss Jami
#15. It is rather when
We gloriously forget ourselves, and plunge
Soul-forward, headlong, into a book's profound,
Impassioned for its beauty and salt of truth
'Tis then we get the right good from a book.
Elizabeth Barrett Browning
#16. Every age has its own outlook. It is specially good at seeing certain truths and specially liable to make certain mistakes. We all, therefore, need the books that will correct the characteristic mistake of our own period. And that means the old books.
C.S. Lewis
#17. I like Jo Nesbo and Hakan Nesser. There are so many good books in the world. I don't want to spend time reading bad crime novels.
Maj Sjowall
#18. Reading a book is like going on a great journey. You don't know what'll happen, but something is bound to change. And for me, that change has always been good.
Shannon Hale
#20. By then, [1737]...the French were taking advantage of the new "reading rooms" created by architects such as Blondel and of new seat furniture and had begun a practice we now call curling up with a good book.
Joan DeJean
#21. He pinched the remaining chapters' pages delicately between his fingers and sighed. He always hated reaching the end of a good book.
David S.E. Zapanta
#22. I grew up reading 19th-century novels and late Victorian children's books, so I try for a good story full of coincidence and error, landscape and weather. However, the world was radically changed during my lifetime, and I tell of that battering as best I can.
Fanny Howe
#23. Conversations and jokes together, mutual rendering of good services, the reading together of sweetly phrased books, the sharing of nonsense and mutual attentions.
Robertson Davies
#24. I write to get ideas out of my head
Bobbi Kay
#25. I often feel sorry for people who don't read good books; they are missing a chance to lead an extra life.
Scott Corbett
#26. The failure to read good books both enfeebles the vision and strengthens our most fatal tendency
the belief that the here and now is all there is.
Allan Bloom
#27. I have a household of good books, and reading tends to take for me the place of experience - or rather to become itself experience concentrated. You will say this is a dull picture, but I cultivate dulness in a world grown too noisy.
Henry James
#28. Buy good books, and read them; the best books are the commonest, and the last editions are always the best, if the editors are not blockheads.
Lord Chesterfield
#29. As we expand our knowledge of good books, we shrink the circle of men whose company we appreciate.
Ludwig Feuerbach
#30. A good reader should always have two books with him: one to read, the other one to lend.
Gabrielle Dubois
#31. In order to pronounce a book bad it is not enough to discover that it elicits no good response from ourselves, for that might be our fault.
C.S. Lewis
#32. I always try to treat the book itself as the artwork. I don't want you to stop while you're reading one of my books and say, 'Oh! What a gorgeous illustration!' I want you to stop at the end of the book and say, 'This is a good book.
Chris Raschka
#33. Anything that spreads books and brings about more books, I would say it is good. Good medicine, not bad.
Jenny Colgan
#35. The summer passed quietly. I busied myself as best I could, reading a good deal.
Michael Cox
#37. There's no better way to inform and expand you mind on a regular basis than to get into the habit of reading good literature.
Stephen R. Covey
#38. Read a good book every day. Books help to educate the soul. The mere joy of learning something new will instill the will to live in you.
Sanchita Pandey
#39. A children's story that can only be enjoyed by children is not a good children's story in the slightest.
C.S. Lewis
#40. When she thinks a book is very good, what she says to herself is: yes, that's how things are. I hadn't thought of it before, but that's how things are.
Ellen Douglas
#42. As with a love affair, the battered heart needs time to recover from a good work of fiction.
Michael Dirda
#43. When I was in my twenties and broke, I'd buy books before food. A meal will sustain you for a few hours, a good book will sustain you for life.
Gabrielle Zevin
#44. I was raised to respect books - the house was full of them. From the time I was little, it was drummed into our heads that books were almost the most important thing in the world, second only to getting a good education.
Martha Southgate
#45. I think that writing should be honest and simple, and it should say something about what it means to be a person. When God is good to us, we write in such a way that the act of reading becomes a pleasure to those who buy our books.
M.V. Carey
#46. In junior high school, I learned that I could be good at school. I remember liking the freedom to choose classes and the pleasure of learning and doing well. My perseverance and love of reading had somehow allowed me to overcome many disadvantages of dyslexia, and I read a lot of books for pleasure.
Carol W. Greider
#47. To acquire the habit of reading is to construct for yourself a refuge from almost all the miseries of life.
W. Somerset Maugham
#48. It is no more necessary that a man should remember the different dinners and suppers which have made him healthy, than the different books which have made him wise. Let us see the results of good food in a strong body, and the results of great reading in a full and powerful mind.
Sydney Smith
#49. I learned little save that most of the deeds, good and bad both, incurring opprobrium or plaudits or reward either, within the scope of man's abilities, had already been performed and were to be learned about only from books.
William Faulkner
#50. Accolades and lists may tell us about accomplishments, but life is meant to be experienced, not just accomplished. It's like the difference between reading books for the sake of reading and reading books just to get a good grade.
LZ Granderson
#51. There are a lot of good books around. People don't read any more. It's a sad state of affairs. Reading's the only thing that allows you to use your imagination. When you watch films it's someone else's vision, isn't it?
Lemmy Kilmister
#53. Writers: read books. Read good books. Read bad books. Learn what does and does not work.
Kira Hawke
#54. The "to read' list is a place where most good books go to die...
Danny L. Deaube
#55. I sometimes look at my bookshelf now and think about how someday I'm going to die without ever reading a lot of the books there. And one might be life-changingly good and I'll never know.
Jeff Zentner
#57. It is both relaxing and invigorating to occasionally set aside the worries of life, seek the company of a friendly book ... from the reading of 'good books' there comes a richness of life that can be obtained in no other way.
Gordon B. Hinckley
#58. No book, however good, should ever be read as a task. If you do so read a book, it is very likely that you will not only get nothing out of it but that you will have toward the book and its author a repugnance that is unwarranted.
Burton Rascoe
#59. Anyone who is too lazy to master the comparatively small glossary necessary to understand Chaucer deserves to be shut out from the reading of good books forever.
Ezra Pound
#60. The Real-World was a sprawling mess of a book in need of a good editor.
Jasper Fforde
#61. I love buying and collecting good books: I am passionate reader. This is my sacred life.
Lailah Gifty Akita
#62. A good book is always on tap; it may be decanted and drunk a hundred times, and it is still there for further imbibement.
Holbrook Jackson
#63. Many people tell me that they don 't know what to feel when they finish one of my books because the story was dark, or complicated, or strange. But while they were reading it, they were inside my world and they were happy. That's good.
Haruki Murakami
#64. Good fiction often gives us characters in extremity, which ironically gives us a clearer mirror in which to see ourselves.
Sarah Van Arsdale
#65. If there was no Bible, it would be no matter whether you could read or not. Reading other books would do you no good.
Jupiter Hammon
#66. It is not the reading of many books which is necessary to make a man wise or good; but well reading of a few.
Richard Baxter
#67. I don't finish a lot of the books I read. I get enormous pleasure from reading half f them, two-thirds of them, even incredibly good books. But I don't feel it's my duty to finish them. I read the last few pages and find out what happens at the end.
Jackie French
#68. I believe we do well to fall asleep each night with books. We enter the library of our dreams in good company then.
Robert Stephen Parry
#69. Reading stimulates the imagination and a good imagination can change the world in the most splendid of ways.
Meredith Wood
#70. I started writing while I was a little boy. Maybe it's because I was reading a lot of books I admired, and thought that I would like to write something like that someday. Also, my love for good writing pushed me.
Naguib Mahfouz
#71. Books have immortalized great minds. Books have kept ancients secrets alive. A world which least value books, least value the real essence of wisdom and least know how to preserve what is precious!
Ernest Agyemang Yeboah
#72. Our society accepts the book as a given, but the act of reading
once considered useful and important, as well as potentially dangerous and subversive
is now condescendingly accepted as a pastime, a slow pastime that lacks efficiency and does not contribute to the common good.
Alberto Manguel
#73. When the writing is good, a book becomes a mirror. The reader will see an uncanny familiarity and respond accordingly.
Jen Knox
#74. I had decided to become a bookseller because I loved good books. I assumed there must be many others who shared a love for reading and that I could minister to their needs. I thought of this as a calling.
Stuart Brent
#75. Take a good book to bed with you - books do not snore.
Thea Dorn
#76. A person who does not read cannot think. He may have good mental processes, but he has nothing to think about. You can feel for people or natural phenomena and react to them, but they are not ideas. You cannot think about them.
[Life magazine, December 10, 1965]
Rex Stout
#77. 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
#78. An unread book does nobody any good. Stories happen in the mind of a reader, not among symbols printed on a page.
Brandon Mull
#79. It wasn't until I started reading and found books they wouldn't let us read in school that I discovered you could be insane and happy and have a good life without being like everybody else.
John Waters
#80. I have built a city from the books I've read. A good book sings a a timeless music that is heard in the choir lofts, and balconies, and theaters that thrived within that secret city inside me.
Pat Conroy
#81. A good vocabulary is not acquired by reading books written according to some notion of the vocabulary of one's age group. It comes from reading books above one.
J.R.R. Tolkien
#82. You may think that you don't want to read about the problems of being brought up Mennonite, but the great thing about books is that you'll read anything a good writer wants you to read.
Nick Hornby
#84. I am forever an advocate of books, both the reading of them and the writing. There is something sacred to me in that community. Because writing
and reading
is a solitary business. And it's good to know I'm not alone.
Shannon Celebi
#85. One can't prescribe books, even the best books, to people unless one knows a good deal about each individual person.
Rudyard Kipling
#86. A good book, he had concluded, leaves you wanting to reread the book. A great book compels you to reread your own soul. Such books were for him rare and, as he aged, rarer. Still he searched, one more Ithaca for which he was forever bound.
Richard Flanagan
#87. A good book is like really loved item at a really good restaurant, every time you go there you order it to see if it tastes like you remember, only to find out it is even BETTER than you remembered!
K.A Cameron
#88. Some of these things are true and some of them lies. But they are all good stories.
Hilary Mantel
#89. That the reading of good books, is like the conversation with the honestest persons of the past age, who were the Authors of them, and even a studyed conversation, wherein they discover to us the best only of their thoughts. That eloquence hath forces & beauties which are incomparable.
Rene Descartes
#91. Had she read any good books lately? At all? She could tell him that she was going to take out a subscription at the library tomorrow because she was feeling starved of good reading material and could he recommend anything that she might not already have read?
Mary Balogh
#92. We may need to put down the book from time to time, but we should make sure not to let the computer become the new book. The universal medium, like the universal library, is a dream that does more harm than good.
Andrew Piper
#93. Reading books might itself be a bit weird, but obviously okay, since books were part of school, and doing well in school was clearly a good thing. But comics were more like candy, just flashy wrappers without any nourishment. Cheap thrills.
Michael Dirda
#94. There is such seduction in a library of good books that I cannot resist the temptation to luxuriate in reading.
John Quincy Adams
#95. What makes a good book? Simply put, a good book is one that you enjoy reading.
Carmela Dutra
#96. To become a 'good reader' one must give oneself over to a regime of concentrated pleasure. One does not set out to read a book a day (there is no necessary pleasure in that) but may spend two or three years on one book [. . .], read only portions of another, devour a third at a single sitting.
Michael Schmidt
#97. Reading is a conversation. All books talk. But a good book listens as well.
Mark Haddon
#98. All good books are about everything, abbreviated.
Andrew Smith
#99. Clearly one must read every good book at least once every ten years.
C.S. Lewis
#100. In doing the screenplay for 'Good Night, and Good Luck,' the most important thing for me was to constantly go back to wherever the opposition would argue. So I had to keep reading all the books and articles about why McCarthy is such a good guy.
George Clooney
